Cold as ice

Youssef got back last night and jumped right out of substantially cold weather to slightly less substantially cold weather.  The weather report said that last night's lows were 5^o F.

We made a tripod that supports the net above the chicken run.  The longest part of the process was the half hour spent shooting sparks at a bird's nest that had fallen on the ground full decaying leaves and tree moss using a ferrocerium rod similar to this.

 I plan to add several more rungs for the birds to roost on at some point.  It will just have to be a support for the net until we get to it again.

After building the tripod and lashing everything together, we went to the hardware store to pick up electrical heat tape to rap around the chicken's automatic watering unit.  The previous application of 30ish feet of heat tape and a heat lamp was not sufficient to keep the pipes from freezing.  Today we added an additional 15 ft of heat tape and streamlined the original installation.  It will be interesting to see the outcome tomorrow morning.

Update on the mouse:  It was very fat at its time of passing under the kitchen sink caught by a conventional mousetrap from a big box store using peanut butter as bait.  In the review of the mousetrap that I made, I needed a better round spinning trigger and a larger bucket.  I plan to experiment with a five gallon bucket in the shop soon.