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The Bunch Say TURN THE HEAT DOWN!!!

 

It's so hot that all we want to do is lay in the air conditioning. The pets are ok with this!😂

It's always hot in Texas in August. It comes with the territory and it's not surprising it's hot. What is surprising is how insanely hot it is! Weeks on end of over 105 degree days, multiple days around 110.  It is brutal! It makes it so we pretty much can't leave our house, not because we're basking in the glory of our awesome a/c unit ( and trust me our main house a/c unit is crazy good), but because with heat indexes around 115 everyday someone has to be here to check on the animals every half hour. We have to check that the horses are handling it well, which they do WAY better than the chickens. If they seem insanely hot and miserable we give them a nice cool bath to bring their temperature down a bit. I know that they are really hot when my horse, that swears the devil lives in the hose and wants to attack her, allows us to not only give her a bath, but almost falls ASLEEP while we do it! So during the hottest part of the crazy hot weather, we're outside for 30 minutes working. They seem so happy afterwards that it is worth it. 

The chickens are so much more susceptible to heat. They require so MUCH TIME when it is this hot.  Not only do I have three fans and two mister strands on them, but I have to constantly move the fans around. During the day, they are positioned behind the misters so that way cooler air will blow on them. Now the misters keep the air about 10-15 degrees cooler, which with how hot it has been means that the air in the coop is about 100 still. At night when they go up into their house it is still 98 outside, on a good day. 20 chickens cuddled together in a cage, even with windows, it is crazy hot for them. I have to reposition the fans to blow air onto them just so they can survive the night. On top of that the hot weather makes their water get algae super fast, same with the horse trough, so every other day we clean 6 water receptacles totaling 10 gallons of water. The horse trough is cleaned completely out once a week, but over flowed twice a day to keep the water from becoming too hot for them. We also spend 30 minutes EVERY morning at 6:30 am brushing the dried sweat off the horses from the day before so they can sweat efficiently for the new day. We also have to check on the chickens every 30 minutes during the day so they don't spend too long in the nesting boxes trying to lay and then overheat. So basically the day is spent making sure no one is too hot and if they are then they move out to the garage, which we keep at 80, in order to cool off. As you can see this is super time consuming and usually not this bad because 1.) we get a couple of crazy hot days followed by just normal hot days which means less checking and water cleaning for us and 2.) these days have been just back to back crazy hot and it really is wearing on us and with no end in sight......we're just tired. I also clean the bird bath out twice a day because it's just so hot and they need cool water too. I guess that one I don't technically have to do, but I feel I need to. I also make mud baths and water bowls for our deck bunnies. So far, everyone is surviving, but the chickens are starting to seemed a little taxed. Hopefully, this crazy hot streak ends soon!

In other news, we have been unable to get T into a cardiologist to get an echo stress test. No one will call us back. We have an appointment Wednesday with a general practitioner who hopefully will have better luck getting us in somewhere when they send a referral, which our insurance does NOT require. D also got his latest scan back and it was normal so he just has a stomach ulcer, which the doctor gave him daily medicine to take and D has adjusted his diet and has been doing a lot better. Not completely perfect, but definitely way better than he was and so far he has actually been eating right. Hopefully, he keeps that up since diet seems to have a HUGE impact on his pain levels.

It's so hot that birthday week is coming up and no one seems excited! We're all just tired and ready for the heat to go away! Come on fall, we're ready!!!!!

I learned something interesting this week. You put an UNOPENED can of condensed milk in the crock pot, cover it with water, cook on low for 8 hours, and you get CARMEL! Granted it isn't the best Carmel I ever had, but it is Carmel and so much easier than making it normally. 


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