The two of them spent the evening and most of the night welding the 1" x 1/2" wire on to the sides of the chickens' 12' x 10' run. Here you see them hard at work, with Devon's little Jack-dog looking on.
I took dinner down around 8pm, and cookies and coffee around 11pm, knowing it would be a late night. I went to bed around 2:30am. I heard Devon's rig leave around 4:30am. The next thing I knew, it was 7:30am, Jack was making his typical, I'm-getting-up-soon squeaks, and still no Milan. Yup - he pulled an all-nighter. He finally showed up here at the house around 8:30, wild-eyed and energetic, excited to be "so close" to being done.
Around 10am, our good friend John Harding and his assistant, Kelly, came to mow the lawn (well, the "front yard", that is) and work on the landscaping. Before getting started, we all marched on down to the shop to see this magnum opus chicken run.
It is quite a structure. Talk about being prepared -- Milan spent weeks researching and designing our runs. He made several, major design changes to what you would think is a typical, pastured poultry run. First, it's constructed of steel, not wood, making it much lighter to move. Since it will be moved daily, this is a huge consideration. Secondly, it has a peaked roof, which provides the chickens a sunny "porch", but significantly complicates the design. Here you see the first page of design sketches and calculations. Remember all that math you learned in high school, wondering the whole time who the heck ever uses this stuff? Well, Milan did! Arc tangents, cosines, sines, right triangles... all of it. Wow. I certainly never thought I would ever see these formulas again!
But back to our day.... After admiring Milan's creation, John and Kelly headed off to do the mowing. I returned to my duties as a wife and mom, part of which included preparing lunch for three hungry men, not to mention myself and Jack.
It wasn't until sometime after 2pm that I began to think the Cave Junction post office only gets so many trucks a day; surely they would know what time ours would pull in with chicks on board. I called, and sure enough: had they been coming on schedule, they would have arrived at 8am.
In addition to being completely anticlimactic, the news was disquieting: were our little chicks en route somewhere, only to be stuck there until the next truck left for Cave Junction (which we found out only gets one truck a day -- at 8am)? This whole business of mailing chicks baffled me right from the beginning. I've heard stories about how only the most robust chicks survive to arrive at their destination, and that if they are en route for more than two days, expect to lose 10% of them! It seems rather a cruel and callous way to be initiated into the world. They're only a few hours old when they're shipped.
Thankfully, I called the hatchery and learned our chicks had not yet been shipped. They were scheduled now to go out in the 4pm mailing from Hubbard, Oregon. I then called the postal distribution center in Medford to find out what time they could be expected there. They didn't know for sure, but estimated about 1pm on Thursday, March 25th.
So, one more day to go! It gave us a reprieve in finishing the run and the brooder/hover. After 34 hours straight without sleep, Milan finally crashed at 5pm. I did the evening chores (horses, egg chickens, dog, cat), gave Jack a bath and put him to bed, cleaned the kitchen and headed for bed at nine o'clock.
We were ready... or so we thought.
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