We're getting some rain!

Hello,

We're finally getting some badly needed rain here. Someone said about 65 hundredths of an inch. We might be getting more tonight. In the fields our hay is only a couple of inches high so we have to move the goat pens twice a day instead of once.

This is our super inexpensive goat pasturing pen. It is four cattle panels put together with a pen on wheels that is detachable. I fits about four mothers + kids. We detach it with the goats in the cattle panel area and then move that and then move the shelter and re-attach it. In the picture is my fancy milking stand that folds up against the pen. It works really good!

Here's one of our kids.

Yesterday and today we practiced doing a little survival skills getting ready for an event coming up in New Salem called Prairie Days. Jonathan is going to help with a survival hike. Yesterday we made a water purification tripod (I don't know what it is really called) and drank lake water. Here's a couple of pictures:

You pour the water in the top through the grass, then it seeps through the sand, then it goes through charcoal.
The water on the right is pure lake water and the one on the left is water that was filtered. It made it a little bit clearer when we filtered it.
We poured it through another cloth to strain out any silt that got in there and Jonathan and I both tried it and thought it tasted pretty much like regular filtered water.

Since it rained last night we tried another way of gathering water today. You are supposed to tie a cloth to your leg and walk through tall grass, but we just dragged a rag around to the old cabin and back and along the way squeezed out the water when it got wet enough. The water from that wasn't as nice looking as the filtered lake water but we tried it and it tasted like distilled water. You're supposed to do it in the dew instead of after it rained but we thought it was close enough. Hopefully we won't ever have to depend on those types of getting water but it is good to know.

Peter