Month: November 2023

August is no more

Today my rooster August(us) was not standing well on its legs. Because it’s getting winter and more importantly because my woman is pregnant I decided that this time we wouldn’t try to save the animal ..

Last time one of our chickens (Livia, our white chicken) fell ill we took it inside (somewhere in the basement where the temperature is constant) to save it from the other chickens (who were also picking on her – because that’s what healthy chickens do to a sick one) and give it the yolk of the other chickens’ eggs for extra strength.

It was a mess all the time. Outside the chickens take care of themselves. But petting it inside of the house you kinda have to do all that for the chicken. Chickens shit a lot. The outcome isn’t very hygienic. I was not planning to go through this ordeal with our rooster August.

Anyway. I had already bought a restraining cone for chicken slaughter a few months ago. A sharp knife I had in the kitchen. August was very relax and not very defensive because well, he was feeling sick and all that. It was not hard to put him head first in the cone. I also petted him and calmed him before all this.

That’s all very bad news. But the good news is that this new year’s eve we will be doing Coq au vin!

Afterwards in warm water we plucked the feathers, then opened up the body and took the intestines out (carefully not cutting open the gallblatter and urineblatter to make sure we don’t spoil any meat).

Meanwhile Livia, Julia and the newest of the flock Gwendolyn (that name because she’s a Aarschot’s breed of chicken – I always use political figures for chicken’s names) are still alive and happily laying eggs for us.

It’s ~ decided that Julia must go too. Because our new year’s eve family gathering will count five attendants and we need enough chickenmeat. Plus, the nice people of Hagelandsneerhof organize the Neerhofdieren show every year around the end of Januari at O-Green in Rillaar. I plan to start with a new flock of chickens and buy a new entire group there.

Poor chickens.

They had a good life. I don’t know yet what I’ll do with Gwendolyn and Livia. Especially Livia is very special: she’s always the first to arrive when we bring food. Fiercely fighting for it with Gwendolyn.

Poor August. He was so strong and defensive for his chickens. He cut me several times during one of his attacks (before I learned how to tame him).

But I couldn’t let him be in agony of sickness.

Shoe repair shop

With my Youtube addiction I learned from channels where they rebuild cars, how to renovate your car’s leather seats.

From there I started wondering: can’t I do this with shoes too?

I’m a big fan of Mephisto shoes. Each time I wore them down, I bought a new pair and I kept the old ones for getting the eggs from my chickens and other dirty gardening things.

Any other kind of shoes I owned really didn’t last long but no matter what I did, the Mephisto shoes simply wouldn’t break.

Then from what I learned I used a heat gun to get most of the wrinkles out of the leather. Put a cloth tightly inside the shoe so that it is shaped right in the front. Don’t use your hands for that: you’ll get burned.

Then with a leather repear kit I repainted them.

Then I applied beeswax on the leather. You let the beeswax melt into the pores of the leather by heating it a little bit with the heat gun.

My old Mephisto pairs look almost as good as my new pairs.

Incredible. I have too many pairs of shoes now.

I don’t have pictures from before. But you can trust me that these shoes had basically no more color at all.

You can see that while I was getting the wrinkles out of the leather, I burned the laces with my heat gun accidentally. Guess I’ll need to buy new laces now. The shoe had a lot of wrinkles where it typically bends.

The leather repair kit came with different colors, so I used four different colors on the shoe (as I remembered the original shoe came with different colors there too).

To apply the leather repair paint is about the same as applying shoe polish. It just stays on permanently. Afterwards beeswax. And you’re done.

ps. I wouldn’t try the heat gun trick on shoes of which you are not sure that all of its areas are real leather. Look at my laces: it melts stuff. Heat tends to do that. Ehm, it’s probably a good idea to remove the laces too.

ps. I recommend to tryout on old shoes first.