The last few days have been busy from my point of view.  It seems they have been none stop.  I want to get the chook house up and running for next weekend, so I have started to dig out the droppings of various animals, straw, shredded paper and general soil from it in an attempt to get it clean to prevent diseases.  Chooks take time to settle in and whilst it is not laying season yet, next weekend, what with the weather now getting warmer (honest!) and Spring clearly on its way, next weekend seems like a sensible target to getting the chook house up and running.  Of course there are many, many hurdles along the way, not least of all getting the chooks in the first place, but that can be next week’s problem.  First I need to get the place clean.  When I started to dig out the soil litter from the chook house I didn’t know what kind of floor to expect, if I was even to get anything other than more soil/the ground rock.  What I wasn’t expecting, stupidly, was it to have a wooden floor similar to the covered outdoor entertainment area (at least around the edges).  So it is going to take a while to dig it out.  There is a partition where someone used to keep rabbits from the looks of the droppings which is not making life any easier, and of course, its not doing my back any good, so I have to take it slowly and do 30 minutes here and there.  At least it is covered, that way I can dig it out at anytime of day, because believe it or not, the sun is too warm during the middle of the day already, and there are UV alerts for the 11am-1pm period most days the sun is out now!  So I work inside or in the shade when the sun is at its hottest and outside first thing in the morning when it is still frozen and last thing at night if I’m not cooking our evening meal!

So what else?  Well as the title would suggest, I keep finding marbles.  So far there I have found 44 of them.  One or two of them are really nice marble ones rather than the normal glass ones.  They are strangely scattered across the ground outside the house, not on a surface that you can roll marbles on, the only thing you could do is throw them, but then I usually find them when I am litter picking (yep, another house where previous tenants used the grounds as litter disposal – at least we haven’t found +100 glass bottles outside in the woodland like we did at Keeper’s Cottage).  Sadly what I do find the most of is broken glass, but we do seem to be coming to an end of that – other items include shell casings (only a couple of), those glow light sticks you snap – rather too many of those, and strangely a carbon fibre arrow!  Go figure.  But at least I now have a litter picker uper, that I can stab things with and it collects them!

It has also been our great nephew, Noah’s, 1st birthday (yesterday).  Happy Birthday, Noah. We each had a piece of raw salted caramel chocolate slice each as a ‘celebration’.  Sadly it was rather melted from being in the car, so there is no photo.  I will have to make sure a certain wedding cake option isn’t left in the car for next weekend!

Right, back to work.  I have a kitchen floor to clean, and the sun room to start.  Plus there is a minor ant issue in the bedroom and I have just met one in my tablet cutter, so it is time to take action!  My medication is off limits to ants.  I can put up with most things, but ants in my meds is not one of them! 😀

Edit:  found another marble whilst talking with the builder (amongst other things we have a leak in the roof over the foot of the bed and can’t manoeuvre the bed away from the leak!  We have found that if we took the quilt into the bottom of the bed, we can get the drip to land in a washing up bowl rather than on the quilt, but only if the bed is pushed right up against the chimney which has a few air holes in it that need plugging up.  Now at 45 marbles!