'Bama Week 2

August 1, 2020: Our second week in Alabama has been great. We've been doing a lot of the same type of work. Our typical day goes like this; 6:30am wake up. Dressed, breakfast and then down to the barn. We meet William at 7:00am to feed the horses and the dogs. We bring all the horses in from the fields, get them sorted into their specific stall and then feed them. Then we head to the kennel to feed the dogs. These are the bird dogs which are English Pointers. We hose down the floor of their pen, then bring them each a bowl of food. Two or three get let out into the running pen each day for exercise. After that, we head to the dock to continue working on our big project. This week was phase two of the dock. We removed the old stairs and ramp leading from the road. We are building a much larger, sturdier dock area. This was harder work as we had to dig a lot of post holes in very rocky hard soil. We would work for hours, sweat a ton and not see as much progress, but by the end of the week, we got a lot done. The kids were helping a lot. Using power saws, measuring, carrying boards, and drilling. We work until noon, break for lunch for an hour and then work again until 3:00 or so. Other random jobs we've done this week include more mowing, weeding in the sunflower fields and giving the dogs baths. For fun this week James has had the girls in the woodshop. They are building boot removers. James and the kids rode the horses one day through the sunflower fields. They all had a blast. We went to visit one of the timber crews at work in the woods. They let James drive the tree cutter and let the kids ride along to cut down a few trees. One guy cuts them down, one drags them out of the woods, one grabs them and strips them of all their branches and then stacks them onto the truck. It was a wild, muddy ride into the woods. William also took us out on his boat on the Alabama River. The kids went tubing and waterskiing and we all went swimming. It was great because it has been very hot here.