Chores

Anybody who thinks that its nice to have the house to themselves for a week doesn't hasn't tried to do chores on this farm by themselves! With Sharon and the kids visiting friends and relatives back east, I'm here doing chores over the next week by myself. When we're all on the farm, the chores are divided up and everyone has at least one chore to do in the morning and again in the evening or just after sunset. My normal chores are the cattle, feeding the cows, calves and fat steers. Doing one or two chores can be done fairly quickly when you have everything you need and go strait at it and have your rhythm. When it comes to doing all of the chores it takes a long time. Some of the time is spent going between chores. Some of the time is spent transitioning between the different tools for the different chores. You don't think much about having to get the egg basket when you're just get eggs, or having the water can to fill the chickens water if you have to get eggs and give water, but when you move between chores you have to gather the tools for one chore and drop off tools for the others just completed. Just moving between bottle feeding a calf where you have to mix the milk replacer in the house and put that in a the bottle to feed them and then you have to move to do chicken chores which means getting a basket, water etc and dropping off the bottle and go to another part of the farm feed, water and collect eggs, and then back to the back of the farm to the cows with the skid loader to move a round bale out to the pasture and back and forth it goes. The other thing that takes time is the inefficiency of doing something you don't do regularly. So today when I had set the egg basket on an egg box where the chickens lay their eggs, and I closed the lid and knocked half of the eggs out of the basket, that wasn't only a learning experience but a costly one! Once I was finished with chores this morning I had eggs just to make myself feel better. How many more days until everyone is home, I really miss them already?