An unusual day

Yesterday something unusual happened. (BTW, unusual has for years been one of my favorite words to spell. Maybe it's the sing-song-y way it's spelled. Kinda like a cheer "U-N-U-S-U-A-L; That's the word I like to spell. Leeeeet's yell! Leeeeet's spell! U-N-U-S-U-A-L!" Okay, now you're thinking, "I know why she likes that word, she relates to it. SHE'S unusual!") Anywhoo, back to the story. Yesterday something unusual happened. It rained. It hasn't done that in weeks, maybe months. We really needed the rain. Ever seen chickens when it rains? They stay huddled up in the coop unless they were coming out to eat. Ever seen a WET chicken? It actually spurred a dinner conversation that Jonathan initiated about the oil glands that water birds have under their feathers that obviously chicken do NOT. They just look soaking wet. It's kinda funny. Sorry I didn't get a picture of it.

The goats huddled up under the eaves of the front porch, much to Jackson's dismay, and stayed for most of the day.


And then this morning, here's what popped up.
For the benefits of the foreigners (e.g. non-Texans) this is a fire ant mound. These ants are small like the sugar ants of TN, but they sting and it feels like, well, fire! It's one of the very few bummer things about Texas. I'll take the house flies of TN over the fire ants of TX any day. But here they are. Now that it's rained, we probably have hundreds of these around on our property.
And, this is our front porch this morning. It's not ant beds, it's goat poop. Yuck!

So today, we're going to have an official "Scoop the Poop and Kill the Hill" day at Dagerath Academy. Idecided against calling it "Scoop the Poop and Pound the Mound" day because I feel sure that at least one of my boys would take "pound the mound" to mean, stick your foot in the ant hill before you put poison in it. That could be trouble. (Added later: Turns out, that's just what Jeremy did when he was doing the poison. You know, a GIRL would NEVER think to do that!)

It says in Proverbs that we should "Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest." Prov. 6:6-8 We're going to do just that. We're going to go to the ants, watch them, then dump poison on their hills. My normally organic-loving self takes a back seat when it comes to fire ants. I'm ruthless. And it's going to be "all hands on deck" to knock these guys out.

Then we'll pull out the "poop blower" (a.k.a. leaf blower-but since we don't have any trees here that dump their leaves, it works beautifully to blow the goat poop off of the porch and driveway!) and clean off the front porch.

Gotta take the bad with the good. We'll take the rain everytime! And we'll just make a fun day of it. Maybe I'll make t-shirts! or maybe just a cheer! :-)