I am attempting to take a cue from our cat Stella and be lazier. I have been feeling lately that I have been working too much and need to slow down and give my body and mind a little bit of a break. Easier said than done though, I seem to have become a doer. Who would have guessed that I, self proclaimed T.V.-aholic, would start to feel guilty if I didn't redeem myself daily by working my ass off. I can't say what it is exactly, although I would guess that my family's curse/ blessing to always be doing SOMETHING worthwhile is partially to blame. That and Husband's seemingly endless amounts of inspiring energy paired with the seemingly endless amounts of projects we have to do. So, today I fulfilled both my needs by making the chickens a little feeder for the crushed oyster shells we give them to increase the calcium in their diet to ensure the proper thickness of shell on their eggs.
We got the idea to create a feeder for oyster shells from the fabulous chicken coop at Pistils, a small and pretty urban nursery in Portland. Theirs was a very nice galvanized number, but I thought I could scrounge something just as nifty. So from my collection of tin cans I pulled out an old olive oil can that a friend had given to me with a fig tree in it. The fig tree is now in a bigger pot and the can was free to be tinkered ( I actually think that is the correct word for working with tin ).
Have you ever been up late at night watching PBS? Well if you have, you have probably seen "Alone in the Wilderness." If you haven't then you should. The guy, Dick Proennoke, built his own log cabin in the Alaskan wild, and while he built the basic stuff to survive he also created a lot of creature comforts out of tree boles and gas cans which at the time where made of metal. I love to watch skilled people make things, and so I remember watching him transform these metal cans into useful items. So, inspired, I cut the can shorter so that when I rolled down the sides they wouldn't be too bulky.
I then took a random small metal rod that we dug out of our yard ( we end up keeping a lot of the "junk" we dig up because it often comes in handy ) and started crimping the can edge down around it with a pair of pliers. I knocked the metal rod out of the rolled edge with a hammer when I was done with each side. It took a little bit but I sat in our hammock with the sun on my back under our lovely blooming pear tree and listened to the chickens clucking and Ruby sniffing around. I felt peaceful, and thing is, the tinkering, the
doing was part of the peace.
Ok, it wasn't all peaceful. I cut the buhgeezus out of my thumb and had to run in the house and try not to get blood all over. But with lesson learned I finished the job with gloves on. Preety respectable if I do say so myself.
I wired the finished project to the inside of the chicken run and filled it full of oyster shell plus a little bit of scratch to tempt the birds into investigating this new contraption in their home.
Project done, I laid back in the hammock and spent a good hour reading and basking in the spring sunshine. Stella would be so proud.
