It was a windy, rainy day today. The cats and I stayed in, the sheep all stayed under cover. Even the Shetlands decided it wasn’t worth running away when I started scarily waving hay around.
The weather station on top of our roof shows a peak gust of 51 mph, the fastest of the year. The bird feeders and worm bins are all still on the balcony, but not necessarily in the same spot they were in 24 hours ago.
The only problem seems to be the tarp on the hay. I tightened it up in front ok, but it seems to be riding up in back. I was never really satisfied with the tie-down job back there, but we couldn’t find anything else to attach to. Well, now I know it’s bad, but if I hadn’t seen any fixes on a nice day, I wasn’t about to try teetering over the 12 foot drop in the rain and half a gale. I’ll try again tomorrow but I’m honestly afraid that the only possible fix is re-stacking the bales forward to free up some attachment points in back.
This is not only hard work, but a pretty problem in geometry since I don’t have a second platform to re-stack onto. I’m very tempted to say that ten bucks worth of hay isn’t worth it, but what do we do when it snows three feet in March and we need those four bales? Getting the Shetlands has eaten all our margin, and buying hay in a cold snowy March is basically impossible.
The Panic problem also remains. He was as sheltered today as anyone else (and would have been ok without shelter) but he can’t stay there all winter. I guess I need to break down and build him a pen. Well, all carpentry starts with head scratching. I’ll do that tomorrow.