Well, everyone who follows via FB knows but now I’m just here to vent.

I lost one of my chickens today because of our heat-wave and I’ve got another one resting in the house trying to recover.

It hit 115 here today and my two smallest chickies took the brunt of it.  I am honestly not sure which one died, or which one is inside the house with me right now. (I can only identify 2 of the 7 chicks by color markers, the other 5, well, 4 now, look identical.)

I had to wedge myself into the coop door to get her, she was out of reach from both the big gate and the coop/hutch door.

I brought her outside to the chicken run where it was slightly cooler and a little more wind going and let cool a little bit outside before bringing her in (the sun was just going down.) It still about 104 outside but I needed her to cool down a little more slowly.

Our AC had kicked off (the house was 100 degrees inside) (we have a bad AC unit) and the house was about 85 when I brought her in.

She’s next to the floor vent right now, at about 80 degrees, and she’s drinking water on her own now, pruning herself and she’s shifting (She’s too weak to stand) but she is trying….

Ray’s at the store getting shade cloth for the sides of the hutch, just too much sun getting in and not enough shade. The chicks retreated to the coop to get out of the sun but the coop was hotter.

They also might be a little bit egg-bound right now which might have caused some complications.

The other 4 were running around just fine and were treated to some fridge cold watermelon, they went to town on it.

I’m gonna be waking up frequently tonight to check on our little trooper and make sure she’s doing better….

I’m thankful to be watching her cuz I think otherwise I’d be a wreck about the other chicken. I have had them since they were 2 weeks old.

The joys of home ownership.   We had a cracked faucet that broke due to our weird freezes this year. We have been trying to find time to tackle it together and due to some insomnia today, we had that chance.

We turned the water off at the road (well, mostly, it’s still got a little pressure which is causing issues) and went to tackle the pipe. The idea was to move the pipe slightly away from the cement wall it was attached to so we could get the pipe wrench around it and unscrew the nozzle that cracked. As soon as Ray moved the pipe from the wall, the pipe fitting broke…. UNDER GROUND…

There’s too much PVC glue so we can’t get the fittings unscrewed.  Ray’s on hopefully his last trip to Home Depot, we had to cut off the pipe below the elbow and we’re going to have to get a new elbow joint, put that on the pipe, and then cap the elbow.  Hopefully we can get it sealed, the issue is that there’s still water pressure and stopping it completely requires other tools. Worse comes to worse, I know what we need but hoping we can avoid that.

So as you can see, it’s a little muddy. On the positive side, due to the leak being so bad, it was very easy for Ray to dig down to it. Usually you can’t dig into the ground unless you’ve got a breaker bar and some major tools due to the Arizona hard ground…

We have no water right now. Thank god we irrigated and it rained because we’ve been using the puddles and water from the horse trough to get the mud off of Ray. (Bless his heart, I haven’t gotten any mud on me because he’s doing all the hard work.)