It is said that bad things always occur in threes - certainly last Friday fit this pattern. 

Our chicken processor notified us on Friday morning that due to a shortage of manpower, our processing date was being moved from Monday, October 4th to Thursday, October 7th.  Though it may not seem like much, a three-day period can have a major impact. First of all, three extra days of feed results in a lot of chicken growth, so we'll have bigger chickens than we planned. Also, the chicken shelter must be moved daily, and I have a limited space to move before I run into another fence.  Instead of moving the shelter forward in a straight line, I’m forced to bend and turn like a drunken sailor to make the most of the remaining space.

 

Additionally, there are 200 chicks in the brooder that are more than ready to be transferred into the chicken tractors in the pasture. However, I cannot move them to pasture because my chicken tractors are full of mature birds awaiting processing. Having chicks in the brooders requires additional work; their bedding must be changed on a regular basis, and their food and water tanks must be refilled every day.  The longer they remain in the brooder, the more work it is for me. 

 

Most importantly, I ran out of chicken breasts a week ago, yet I still need to supply chicken breasts to our Buyers Club members. If the butchering date hadn't been changed, we could have met this obligation without any problem.  Fortunately, I was able to reach out to club members via email and Facebook posts to work out substitutions and keep my commitment.  Having negotiated this mess Friday morning, I thought my chaos quota for the day had been filled, but I was wrong. 

 

I went to check on the pigs a few hours later and found that they were not where I left them. I had introduced them to a larger pasture earlier in the day, and thinking they'd be content for a while there, I set about doing my "day job".  I checked on them periodically, and the last time I saw them, they were hiding from the sun in their regular pen; imagine my surprise to find that they had vanished just 30 minutes later. 

 

Following a frantic search of the nearby pastures, I finally found the pigs digging for tubers in the creek bottom behind my neighbor’s stock tank - they were in pig heaven and hadn’t heard my calls.  With the approaching darkness, it was hard not to panic. I needed to get the animals back on my property and safe in their enclosure for the night. I knew I would reinforcements to help me get the wanderers back home, and luckily Molly and Jordan available.  After putting on wading boots and finding some guide sticks, we set out to flush them out of the mud and back to their pen for the night.

 

Needless to say, I was pretty stressed out by nightfall, so I decided a nice soak in the hot tub would be just the thing - and it was, until I dropped my iPad Pro into it while exiting the tub.   I have become utterly dependent on my iPad. I use it for everything - my "day job", tracking ranch activities, social media, market transactions, and bedtime reading.  So now it’s 3 am and I’m writing this newsletter on my laptop, rather than reading G.A. Henty adventures on my iPad trying to get back to sleep. I feel like I’ve paid my chaos dues this month, but you never know what’s gong to happen next out here. See you all at the market!