The mailbox killers

2 eggs yesterday.
Thursday night someone hit our mail box. The box was a plastic box with an integral stand kind of a beige-ish brown color with a cutesy green roof. It had fake windows. It wasn't us. Still, on the current list of priorities replacing the mailbox was number 1783 out of 21,468. So it was some ways down the list. The choice was taken out of our hands. I got up Friday morning, did my usual animal related tasks (I don't want to call them chores) and drove off. I opened the first gate, the one with the electric wire at the bottom that has bitten both Kristi and Barbecue. I opened the second gate at the road, picked up the paper and left. I noticed the mailbox diagonally across the road was barely hanging on its pole. I left for work. Kristi followed me out and immediately noticed that our mailbox was gone. Not just knocked down but completely gone! Who would want to steal a tacky plastic mailbox? Well gone is gone so we got a new task put on our list. When we returned we found that the four by four post that held the box up was snapped off at the ground level. Somebody hit it a ton. We drove up and down the street looking for it. No luck so we went off to the hardware store to buy mailbox building stuff. We looked at the standard mailbox kits and didn't like them. So we designed our own. We bought one 8ft fencepost - this is an eight inch diameter log that has had the bark trimmed off. They are used for an anchor to stretch barbed wire fences to keep them tight. We wanted something sturdy. Bought two cement bags, a few 9 inch lag bolts and a large mailbox. Next stop was Tractor Supply for some horseshoes, reflectors and tried to find some large numbers for the address. We went to McCoys too looking for numbers. All we could find were teensy four inch numbers. That's great if people actually drove the thirty mile per hour speed limit, but since the average speed is closer to 50 mph we needed big visible numbers. That meant we go the DIY route. I had an old 1x6 in the lumber pile and a scroll saw. Kristi found a suitable font and blew it up to about 1000 points. That gave us a 7.5 inch number. That would be big enough. Kristi printed out her number and meticulously cut it out. I cut up the 1x6 into the right length and then figured out how to use the scroll saw. It took a while to cut the numbers and sand them so they looked somewhat the same. Then they got several coats of paint. I also had two half round pieces from a table top that I used as a protective decoration to help prevent baseball bat damage. The whole thing was cut and bolted together. Late Sunday we threw it all on the truck and cemented it in the ground. It was a long day and we were both exhausted. Then we went grocery shopping at 7pm. Whew.
Yesterday Kristi worked on refurbishing the chicken coop I built. We're expecting 45 broiler chickens (Cornish cross) later this week. We will likely move the Barred Rocks into that coop when the broilers come in. So it needs to be in good condtion. Maybe I'll even finish installing the last two pieces of trim. She also cleaned out the livestock water tank. This is a five foot by two foot by 18 inch galvanized metal tank with an automatic filling valve. It gets nasty after a few months. She made it look new. I took the opportunity of the tank being emptied to put it up on concrete blocks and level it so water won't slop out.