One Year, 135 Posts Later....

Lawdy, lawdy, who'd have thunk it? Today we turn one year old here at FBH.

Above: The future site of The 2007 Chicken Raising Experiment. Really. It just needs a little work.

Technically, the 'anniversary' was yesterday, Earth Day in fact, which seemed very appropriate for a treehugging Greenie like myself. Of course, you're probably asking, "Wait? Where are all the Earth Day pictures of long-haired hippies like yourself cavorting naked about in your Birkenstocks, smoking dope, eating tofurkey dogs and celebrating this suspiciously heathen sounding holiday?"*

Well, for one, I am staunchly pro-cavorting, everyone would benefit from more cavorting... but frankly, rather than dancing about in Mother Nature, I was cleaning up after her and her furry children.

But I did get my first mosquito bite of 2007, so we have one milestone out of the way. The big, slow ones are out.

As noted earlier, my weekend consisted largely of cleaning: getting the caribou heads down out of the tree, cleaning up a particularly disgusting example of dog digestion gone wrong on my carpet (think 'spattered' and you'll have the idea), and finally, working on The Chicken Coop To Be.

Amongst the things that have been found on the property thus far are the remnants of three buildings. They're what we like to call 'structurally questionable' - but I like to think I'm keeping with the fine rural AK tradition of 'no building is done being useful until it has actually burned to the ground. '

Okay, two of them are mostly just a pile of old lumber with a few posts still up. (I'm thinking 'planter boxes that'll be easily fenced to keep out the moose.') The third, pictured above, just needs a little work. That, and I need to clear a massive growth of wild roses. They're evil, thorny, and no matter what, you get stuck a lot.

Plans call for the care and feeding, (followed later by the beheading and plucking), of 18 or so meat chickens. Flic, experienced chicken raiser that she is, is providing technical assistance and advice.

My progress for the weekend:

• 1/3 of the CTB cleared out. I took a beer break that turned into a work hiatus.
• Got the heads out of the tree. (The found bag of rubber gloves came in handy.) Now have a pile of heads next to the fire pit.
• The carpet is stain and stink free.
  

Yeah, the heads are in a pile next to the fire pit. I managed to saw off the one good set of antlers so a friend of mine can use it for knife and ulu handles. The plan was to burn them with brush, but my site isn't safe enough for a burn... I still need to clear down to mineral soil around it, line it with rocks, etc. I don't want to have a Nenana.

More, of course, later. But a shout out to Flic! Thanks for being a partner in crime.

*Two, I've never owned a pair of Birkenstocks. Three, I'm no longer a long-haired hippy chick. Nope. One day, about a month ago, I woke up and decided that I'd just had it with long hair.