Poison in the Spring

the poison oak is looking so fresh and lovely as it reaches out to try and brush you.

Things in various levels of completion

It's not been too exciting around here lately, but some of the projects have moved a bit to a point where a photo might be interesting.  A new batch of flagstones - and a new move to flagstone rather than urbanite(concrete) has got this 2-pick-up-truck-load pile sitting and waiting to be put down:

We're back in the chicken game, with me having caught the one 'wild' chicken who was living in the woods and another generous gift from our neighbors of 2 more chickens had me building a new, stronger coop.  The plastic is to help keep off the rain, and not a permanent feature. It's built, by the way, entirely from one pallet that our extra solar panel came on: 

Other excitement has been around the fact that it finally started raining, and I am now close to having 15,000 gallons of rain water stored.  Here's the inside of the top 2 5k ones... they're hooked together (see below) and almost to the top.

I just created a siphon from one to the other, and it has kept up the balance between the one that gets fed from the roof and the separate one. I will plumb them together later.  

Then I discovered mice are trying to move in to the solar circuit box. Great. 

Worse than mice in the electronics, I discovered a leak in the roof.  We had water coming in *next* to a skylight.  Luckily, the roof warranty still had 6 weeks left of it's 5 year contract (!) and I got the roofers back up here. This is his knife, as he was checking the seal you can see below the knife. They just took 10 minutes to make a change.  It better hold.