Much busy, but little progress.

Starting to get into wintry weather - clear nights come with hard freezes, and maybe we'll be getting rain again soon.

Got to do some building of little things, like shelters for chicken & duck feeders - things to keep rain out of the feed, even if it's windy; keep spilled feed contained; and lock up at night so rodents can't get in.

Also got to do something about a bigger waterer for the ducks, and heated waterers.  The current plan is to put duck/chicken float-bowl cups on a couple of food-grade 5-gallon pails, and work out some sort of temperature-controlled, low-voltage immersion heaters, maybe with little circulation pumps.

Speaking of immersion heaters, I went looking for on Amazon for something suitable for keeping the small wading pool from freezing - like, 120V, few hundred Watts, very well insulated and grounded, and can be set to cut off at maybe 40°F, so as to keep the pool from freezing but not actually get it hot.  Nope!  Immersion heaters are there aplenty, but they're 1.5-2kW, cut off somewhere around scalding, and come with warnings not to use the pool while the heater is immersed and plugged in - not very helpful.  I expect I'll cobble something together, probably involving 24V power, a circulation pump, a capsule heater or two, and a temperature controller - sort of a big brother of what I'm contemplating for the buckets.

The current toaster project continues busy.

The oven didn't show up on Thanksgiving - surprise!  Joy plans on doing some in-person cage rattling again tomorrow.

And, we hadn't heard back from the septic-system guy, despite the hot weather having passed.  Turns out he's having back trouble, and doesn't have assistants to do the digging.  So... Joy and I had to dig.  I went forth, commenced digging at the spot the guy had marked, and after a while struck tank.  Hm.  What am I looking for?

Consult the Interwebs.  Find all manner of contradictory information, none of it very helpful in deciding which way to explore.  Joy comes out to help, and points out that an area around the downstream end of the not-healthy grass has a different feel to it.  So we dig there, and, only a couple of inches down, there is indeed something that appears to be a large access cover - bearing exactly zero resemblance to anything I'd found on line, but presumably the thing that needs to be dug up.

Oh, and we're starting to get, maybe, some help in looking after my father.  Turns out the medical center has various departments geared toward helping elderly patients living at home, but we hadn't been asking the right questions the past couple of years.

Oops!  Sun's getting low; time to put the poultry to bed and bring in their food and waterers (so rodents don't eat the food and the waterers won't be frozen solid in the morning).  Supposed to be getting a few hours of freezy weather again tonight.

Comments

[Rob]

Septic lids...on youtube there is a guy "Poor Pumper Society" who does entertaining shorts on this sort of thing.
Good luck with the oven!