On Saturday Jim, Jonathan and Peter headed to near Bismarck to attend the 7th annual Prairie Days, which is a weekend of fun, fellowship, and teaching of homesteading skills. A lot of our friends attend the event. This year Jonathan was asked to provide a workshop on survival skills, and then the three played bluegrass music during one of the shared meals.
Andrew, David and I stayed behind to take care of the home front. We were kept busy with chores ... Jonathan has a lot of chickens running around at various stages of development, so we kept busy keeping everybody happy.
There are broiler chickens and our egg layers in movable pens out in the field, and we made sure there was plenty of fresh water and food for them. The cow and horse are also located in this field. 
Those bell waterers can be a challenge to maintain, since the filter can become clogged and then water doesn't refill the tray. We had to clean out a couple of them during our day of keeping watch over the chickens.
These are the chicks still growing in the chicken coop. I can't remember how old they are now, but they are certainly growing like the weeds in the gardens.
So, what do you do with old campaign signs? You create a raft!
Andrew designed and created a raft made out of four old barrels and scrap wood. I was so impressed with the job he did. He even kept a hole in the middle and added a ladder, so after jumping off the raft they can go under the raft and come up in the middle and climb back on.
Instead of anchoring the raft in the lake to be left there all summer they are using poles to push it out to the main part of the lake and then drop anchor and have some fun.
Yesterday I was talked into taking a spin on the raft with David and Andrew. I didn't swim, but enjoyed watching them having fun in the water. The lake isn't very deep, but we poled the raft to a spot where it was plenty deep for the boys. The weather was a bit warmer than when we took the above photo!
Once the boys were swimming we noticed that we were drifting more than we should have been -- turns out Andrew's knot didn't hold when tying the anchor rope to the raft. We were able to pole to where we noticed the rope floating in the water and retied it to the raft.
By then it was time to get back to shore for one more feeding of the chicks before their food was taken away for the night. It turned out to be quite a challenge to pole against the breeze to get back to shore.
Even our dog Samson got into the act of enjoying the water. We didn't allow him to go with us on the raft, so he decided to try to follow us on shore. Just as we were starting to pole back to shore, we noticed that Samson had decided to swim all the way across from one shore to the opposite one. Good thing he is a good swimmer, and made it home before we did. The guys had our camera down at Prairie Days, so I didn't get any photos of the day.
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PS: I don't know how to fix the problem of keeping my paragraphs where I want them to be. Whenever I use photos on a blog entry, it seems I am at the mercy of the Blogger program as to how the paragraphs and placement of the photos are arranged when I publish the post. It has been very frustrating to me. Does anyone else have this problem?
4 comments:
Lynn,
I too have problems with paragraph spacing. Sometimes blogger allows me to skip spaces between paragraphs which is what I usually like to do. Other times blogger just pushes all of my paragraphs together. I always post pictures so that doesn't seem to be an issue. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason for this blogger problem. At least you know that it isn't just you!
grace and peace,
julie
Thanks for the update Lynn.
Send that 80 deg weather right along east. We are
ready for it. No rain please, we got enough of that.
Gp B
I have the same problem with inserting photos...they never go where I want them to. If you hear of a better way, let me know too! Thanks!
That is an awesome raft that Andrew designed! You have some talented boys!!
Hope you are doing well - hopefully we'll have baby news for you soon!
When placing photos you need to create your post in the HTML tab. From there, you can cut and paste the HTML code for your picture and place it any where you want in your post.
The thing to remember is that <> opens a command and the same symbol with a / in it, closes a command. There must be an open and close for every command or you'll get an error.
I wanted to write an example, but using html commands in the comment section is driving blogger crazy. I can say if you put a p in the <>, you open a paragragh. If you type a /p in the middle of <> you close the paragraph. Using <> with an s in the middle before a word or phrase and /s between <> after the word or phrase will make the word or phrase appear in bold font. Use em and /em for italics.
There are many commands. When browsing the internet, click view from you browser's menu bar, then view source or page source to see the html for a particular page. You'll begin to see how it works.
I hope this helps you get started. With a little trial and error you should be able to fix your photo placement problems.
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