Productive days

This weekend has been busy and productive.  Yes, it was all mostly house maintenance stuff but it's nice to have it all done.  For the first time in I don't know how long, there are no clothes in the laundry baskets and no piles of dirty clothes waiting to be washed.  WOW!!  And the dishes are all done, the floors vacuumed, the holiday decorations all put away and, the biggest, most amazing of all:  The shop/pole barn now has heat!!
There was a 'Suntube' heating system installed in there when we purchased the house but we had never turned it on.  Since the former owners had let their chickens roost in the shop, the system was all covered in chicken sh*t.  That and it wasn't hung very safely from the rafters.  And, it didn't have an outside intake.  But, V has been working on it and this afternoon installed the fresh air intake and fired it up.  It runs on natural gas but is actually an infrared heat system.  And it works!!  V was actually able to warm it up enough to apply the finish coat of varnish for the entertainment center shelves that he's still working on.  We're going to use it sparingly since the shop isn't insulated and we don't want to waste all that heat going out through the steel building walls and roof.  But, if we are able to work out there on select days in the winter it will definitely speed up things in the house.  We want to eventually install a wood stove out there and were looking at the few old stoves in my parent's barn when we were down there at Christmas but they would all take LOTS of work to get them operational again. (although I would LOVE to have the old wood burning kitchen range that is out there!!)
The new chore rotation is working out well for the children.  We will enter into week two tomorrow and they will move onto a different set of chores for the week.  Poor K10- You would have thought I was torturing him when he had to vacuum this afternoon.  Of course, the rule is, if you do a really bad job (hoping that you won't have to do it because you do it so badly) you just have to do it again until you learn to do it right. None of the chores in the rotation are things that they haven't had to do before, it's just now there is a weekly assignment so we don't have conflicts over who's turn it is.
J16 was at a friend's birthday party last night and learned that a different friend of hers who was there has chickens.  But, amazingly enough, they don't eat the eggs.  I'm not sure why they have chickens then.  Evidently the mom has trouble eating eggs from chickens she knows,  the daughter (J16's friend) doesn't like eggs and the dad doesn't eat them due to cholesterol problems.  So, there may be negotiations in the future to obtain eggs from them.  Woot!!  Fresh eggs without the chickens.  I'll still be working on V about chickens for us but for the mean time this would be great.