Pain in the butt

Tiny carrot in my bed...uh, that didn't sound right

Weekend is over and I have a hell of a pain all over my body, having used almost all muscles, even those I didn't think would be used by building a coop. One such muscle is my buttocks.
So, the weekend started off not so well. In fact on Friday I got sick, and had to try my best to get well again by Saturday in order to start on time.

I guess the motivation did its job cause on Saturday I was feeling fine. First thing I did was to go out with Tora on a leash for a walk. It was around 5 A.M. and as soon as he got out he started acting weird and sniffing like when he does when he finds a new toy he can eat, like a lizard.

I checked what it was he had found and it looked like a very long lizard. Looking closer, it was actually a snake slithering away slowly. I don't think it was mamushi, but I treated it the same way. I put Tora inside, armed myself with a 2 meter stick and a couple of bricks, and killed it. I think they like to hide in the thick bushes of ugly, so I decided to clean up properly and get rid of all the runners and climbers that are infesting my garden.

After dying, its body kept moving, so I bashed its head in just to be sure. Still it was moving 15 minutes later.

The tiny cute leaves that climb and twist themselves up other plants, when left alone turn into real thick and ugly wooden creatures. I saw that while cleaning up. It took me a good 2 hours to just clean up a small bit of the front yard. I think maybe that is when I started pulling all my unusual muscles. I think I have uprooted almost all of them now.
Then I was ready to build the coop, but of course then the door bell rang and what do you know, all of the tree saplings that I had ordered had arrived unexpectedly.
Oh well, best not waste any time. I had postponed cutting down the remaining part of the tree I chopped down before, plus cutting the bushes around it as I was planning to plant some of the tree saplings there. Now there were no more excuses, so I chopped down the thick trunk to ground level, and trimmed away lots of bushes, and cleared the ground for planting the saplings.
This was actually pretty good timing cause I could dig the snake corpse just under one of the saplings. 
After I was done, it was almost midday and the hellish heat had started...

Assorted sapling

Now I have added 2 walnut saplings, 3 different types of mikan, and 1 mulberry to my future fruit orchard. Yeay!
Then it was finally time to start with the coop. I was already was behind schedule. Working as long as I could I only managed to put together the base of the frame. Luckily I had learned my lesson and was wearing anti mosquito armor. I even had a netted hood, so the little buggers didn't have a chance.

Yeah it looks terrible. I am an amateur after all.

The bad part was that although I had designed the coop frame to be built entirely of 2x4s, the home center did not carry 24 of them...somehow I thought they did, since it is a really huuuge store. So I had to change the design on the spot to the base being 2x4 and the rest being 1x4.
This is OK, except that the straightness rate of 1x4s is much lower than 2x4, so even if I bought all 1x4s they had, I would still have to live with a couple of bent/twisted ones.
Not wanting to wait, I just went ahead and built it. It is just a chicken coop.

It kinda looks straight if you squint really hard

By Sunday midday I had built the frame up except for the roof bit. After I was done I put some tarp on it to protect it from rain.
Actually the tarp in the picture is the floor bit which is much smaller. The overall tarp covers the whole thing.
And here is what the whole garden looks like, which is a mess. In front is my so called raised bed with tiny leaves coming out, on the right the logs I cut. On the left is my orchard and on the top is my ongoing coop project.
I am thinking about adding a water feature somewhere...

The rogue melons from my compost pile are really growing