Chores

For a Sunday, I had a pretty active day. We had a little bit of a snowstorm, nothing that really amounted to anything, but we did end up postponing Number One’s 18^th birthday party.

We can’t even talk about that...I mean, 18! Wow, where did the time go? It seems like we went from shopping for dolls to looking for dorm room furnishings almost overnight.

Setting that aside, there was an ugly wind blowing and just enough ice and snow to make me not want my family on the road. Cancelling the party freed up the rest of my day, and just as well, because it turned out I had a lot to do.

Quite honestly, I have no idea how I found time to earn a living the past few decades. Most mornings my first stop is to check to see if the porch door is closed. If I’m up in time I can let Frances out, but if our schedules don’t coincide, she opens the door herself and declines to close it after going outside. Living as we do in Minnesota, there are about nine days when that isn’t an issue. Next, I have to find her food bowl. No matter where I put it, she picks it up and carries it elsewhere. She's fine drinking from a water dish in the porch but has to eat her from a food bowl that ends up wherever she puts it, so every day is a new adventure. In addition to doing big dog chores, there’s a little dog and a cat that have house privileges and need to be let in and out based on their whims. Keeping all that sorted is about a half time job.

I fill Frances’ bowl with food, put it on top of my pickup, then do chicken and duck chores. I have to do it in that order, because the old dog is losing weight, so I give her a fresh egg on top of her dog food every morning. The chickens and ducks don’t mind – they like to show their appreciation for the coyote deterrence.

Because it was an ugly day, and I was already cold, I offered to do my wife’s cat chores. There’s the regular cat food, then there’s the sick kitten cat food and milk on the heating pad, and then the food for the two half-grown, half-starved kittens that appeared in our yard and now, for some reason, have taken up residence in my shop. It’s a pretty complicated feeding regime, but I’m a responsible guy who’s more or less trainable.

In times like these, I flash back to when I had a few thousand hogs on three farms. Taking care of them took marginally more time than my current animal chores, but on the other hand, I made money from the hogs. So, there’s that.

After I finished the animal chores, I scraped a couple inches of snow off 80 feet of solar panels. Not a lot of work, but for me, a solid upper body work out.

After that I started the small snowblower to do the sidewalks but failed to start the Bobcat snowblower for the yard. I put a heater on the fuel filter and I’ll try again tomorrow.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a job – I doubt I'd be able to fit it in.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olson