Progress update

Tom and Selwyn are making great progress on the second cabin. The plumbing is all ready to be hooked up, and Tom is working on tiling the shower. The middle wall is framed and the door is hung, so all that needs to be done is to finish the shower, hook up the plumbing, and make the middle wall.

The room will be done then, although it will still need to be furnished. Tom wants to build the furniture himself, and we don’t think that will take too long. After all, when we decided to move into this cabin, he made a bed for us in about two hours! The beds he makes for the guest rooms will be nicer than our slapped-together-in-two-hours bed, but still shouldn’t take too long. We’ll also have a lot of finish work to do, like screening in the porch, but the windows all have screens so that won’t need to be done immediately.

Tom and Selwyn hung two new gates for the pasture last week, and we strung some more wire around the fence, so the horses should be secure for the time being. Plus, we’re still tying them out in our neighbors’ field, which means they’re not hungry and breaking out to find food, and the pasture only needs to contain them at night. I’m still not nuts about tying them in the field, but they all look so much better after a couple of weeks of good grass, and Elphie, the filly, is actually acting like a healthy young horse, kicking and playing all the time, so I’m swallowing my horse principles and letting them drag us out there every day.

Dogs are all well, although on Wednesday Stout and Beli will undoubtedly be whining a different story since that’s the day they’re scheduled for being spayed and neutered. Here, it’s outpatient surgery, so we’re dropping them off at 9:30am and picking them up at lunchtime. But, it’s time, and with all the unsprayed and unaltered dogs running around here, we don’t think we can afford to not take care of both of them.

We’re living dangerously and letting our four chickens have the run of the yard now. El Negrito wasn’t growing as fast as we thought he should, so we decided to let them out to free range as well as eat the chicken feed we give them. So far so good with them not being eaten by Nock or Lou.

That’s about it. I’ll add some pictures later in the week, but we loaned out our camera to document a town trip from San Antonio to Chetumal, Mexico, and we don’t have it back yet. I’ll probably even be able to post pictures of the trip, of people and places we don’t even know!