(Well, not so much 'movie' as 'slideshow that doesn't actually slide and isn't exactly a show', but hey, it's kinda close, right?)

It's time for...

WHERE I'VE BEEN: THE BASIL CHRONICLES.

Because yikes, I disappeared completely all summer and am very, very sorry for that. I did need a break so I could focus on real life for a while—and off-grid camping does mean there isn't much electricity or internet—but I still should've been better about communicating, and I really apologize.

However, this means I have some explaining to do—with pictures of really cute baby animals!

Thank you for being patient, guys! (Were you being patient? I'm just gonna assume you were being patient. You guys are awesome.)

So sit back, relax, grab a lemonade, and buckle your industrial-strength steel-reinforced rollercoaster harness, because you're about to find out what homesteaders do when they have to move a farm in the springtime.

(small note: This chapter does contain some mildly personal information, so I'll take it down once I'm sure y'all have seen it. Until then... BRACE YOURSELVES)

It all started way back in March, when we discovered that A) yikes, we were nowhere near close to being ready to move out of our house at the end of the month, and B) our dog—who had not previously looked pregnant at all— was definitely pregnant, and therefore due to have her puppies the week we were supposed to leave.

(I had a new litter of bunnies at the time, so there was that, too!)

This would've been all fine and dandy... except for the fact that we'd already sold our place, and thusly had to be out of the house by early April.

Cue a montage of three straight weeks of frantic packing, accompanied by a rollicking kazoo solo and occasional pictures of my cat.

Now, at this time we had... 37 chickens? Give or take a few? Which may seem like a lot (mostly because it was) but I personally thought it was just the right number. (...yeah, so I liked all my beautiful chickens and didn't want to sell any.)

As moving day approached, we gradually realized that moving with even a few chickens would be slightly unfeasible with the way we had to pack our chicken house. Not to mention chickens don't always handle stress well, and a multi-day cross-country trip might've been a little much for them.

So, I sold my silver-laced Wyandotte quad, our enormously fluffy English Orpington flock, and several of our Buckeyes. The rest of the Buckeyes and our Australorps we gave to some friends.

('Twas a sad day. A sad day with a whole lot of crawling underneath chicken houses to catch chickens for people. Which was probably entertaining to watch, so it was bittersweet.)

I also sold my two rabbit bucks from a previous litter—even though I sort of wish I'd kept one, since they carried both dilute and chocolate and my other bucks don't. (If anyone wants to have a huge, in-depth conversation with me about rabbit genetics, please do because I love the subject and yet still have so many questions)

(Like, what would a red chinchilla rabbit look like? The chinchilla gene takes all the red pigment out of the hair shaft, and the red gene takes all the black pigment out. Would it be an all-white rabbit??)

After selling our chickens, the next order of business was to figure out what we were going to do with our horses. We only had two, which was good, but we really needed to use our horse trailer to transport our chicken coop and biggest dog when we moved. And since we'd be RVing for a while after we got there, where would we keep the horses?

Thankfully, one of our horses actually belonged to a family friend who lived a couple states away—and she'd always liked our own horse a lot, so she was happy to take them both for a while.

That was awesome—she's one of those amazingly cool horse people with the most enormous barn ever (seriously, that thing has an entire arena and an apartment inside of it? In addition to a dozen stalls and two tack rooms? And two cats? I would be happy living in it??)—but it meant we had to plan a really quick road trip.

So, picture this scenario: We've successfully gotten about half of our total stuff packed, the house is a mess of stuff we didn't know we had, and it's two days before we're due to take our horses out-of-state to my parents' friends' place.

We look out the window that morning and smile. Both our horses are laying down taking naps in the sun on the hillside. Horses don't always lay down, so when they do, it's pretty cute.

At about noon, we look out again and see that our mare is napping in another spot, head stretched out and eyes closed. Huh, we think, making a mental note to keep an eye on her. She must be enjoying the sun after it's been so cold. She does like her siesta time.

A little later in the afternoon, we go out and find that she's only barely moved since earlier. My mom went right over while we got the dogs' waters refilled, and as soon as we were done, we jogged over to join her.

"Is Sugar okay?" I asked, a lot more worried now that Sugar's head was flat against the ground and her legs were stretched out. I could see her breathing, at least—but she was breathing pretty hard.

"No," Mom answered evenly, albeit super ominously, as she strode back to the house. "Watch her; make sure she stays calm. If she gets up, make her walk."

I hurried over to where Sugar was stretched out. She had her mouth open slightly as she took deep breaths, and stared at me distantly through one eye. I knelt down beside her.

"What's wrong?" I whispered, wracking my brain for anything that could've happened. Colic? A poisonous plant we'd missed? She did like to eat acorns when they fell in the fall, no matter how many times we raked them up and emphatically chased her off, but this was spring. Maybe she'd had too much green grass?

I hadn't seen her drink anything all day, so I figured that no matter what was going on, it wouldn't get better if she was dehydrated. I called my brother to come over with a bucket of water, which we put by her head where she could smell it.

Nothing happened. I splashed my hand in the bucket so she could hear the noise. Still no response.

I dipped my hand in the water and dribbled a little bit over her mouth, but she just curled her lips and huffed at me, moving her head away.

There was only a little water in the bucket, so I very carefully held it up and tipped it to dribble some on her lips.

For whatever reason, that made her jolt, and she grunted as she gathered her feet under her and slowly stood up.

"She's standing up!" we yelled to Mom, who was likely in the house looking up what to do and didn't hear us.

Sugar shifted to her feet and ambled a few steps away, giving us a tired and annoyed look.

I hurried over to grab her halter, and pulled her in a small circle around to the water bucket. She put her head down, sniffed it, snorted, and started looking intently at the ground next to it.

"Nope—" I said as she bent one knee to lie back down. I pulled her forward a few steps, trying to start walking her around the pasture—but she stopped, wouldn't let me pull her any further, and went down again.

I watched her, worried. She wasn't a big fan of exercise in the first place (we understood each other in that way), but she did know when she was expected to walk. Horses don't usually downright refuse to walk across their own pasture.

I definitely wasn't an experienced equestrian, but I did know that if a horse has a stomachache, it should walk and keep walking—not roll. Horses can get their intestines tangled and obstructed by rolling, whereas walking helps settle them back to normal. However, there's not much you can do when a thousand-pound animal rolls onto its back and starts kicking to roll itself back and forth.

As soon as she took a break from kicking, I rushed in and grabbed her halter, tugging at it gently.

"O—kay, Sugar, c'mon!" I chirped, clicking my tongue and trying to sound encouraging. "Come on! Up! Get up! Let's go!"

Sugar grunted, probably thoroughly annoyed with me at this point, but she rolled onto her stomach and pulled her feet out from under her, preparing to stand up. She gathered herself and slowly rocked to her feet. I didn't want to let her think about laying back down, so I pulled her forward.

"Come on! Good girl... walk n' walk, you can do it," I murmured, trying to keep her walking at a decent pace. "Good girl, there ya go..."

She heaved a big sigh, whuffling slightly, but obliged and kept walking. I looped down the hill and around the pasture, back up the hill, and back again in a few figure eights.

Her strides were stiff at first, but they gradually began to loosen. After a few laps, I paused to put an ear up to her stomach, listening for any sort of noise. Horses' stomachs are notoriously noisy—they eat and digest pretty much constantly, so if you listen, you'll almost always hear a muted gurgling, growling noise. If you don't, it often indicates a problem.

To my relief, Sugar's stomach sounded... gurgly and growly, and instead of showing any interest in lying back down when I paused, she merely started nibbling grass and walking forward as if nothing had happened.

I could have sighed in relief. Was she feeling better? Would she be okay to travel in a few days after all? I hoped so, but I definitely didn't want to make her go on a long trailer ride if she wasn't.

"Here, I'll take a turn. Go finish up with the animals," Mom said when she came back, clipping a lead rope on Sugar and walking her back toward the end of the pasture.

Mom walked her for a while, then I walked her again for a while, alternating between making circuits of the pasture and leading her to the water bucket, trying to get her to drink. (There's a saying about leading a horse to water. It's very true—only after what felt like the fiftieth time did she dip her nose in and take a few sips. Just a few. Apparently she wasn't very thirsty?)

After about an hour, Mom let her loose in the pasture again. Sugar, as usual, whuffed noisily and pranced away a few steps before starting to graze.

We watched her carefully after that, and took her for frequent walks over the next few days—but she merely continued grazing and acted like nothing had happened whatsoever. We still weren't sure exactly what had happened, but we looked her over several times, and nothing visibly seemed to be bothering her anymore. She went right back to putting on her signature annoyed face when asked to go any faster than a walk.

It was probably a stomachache, though it could have been a minor case of colic, but since she showed no signs of anything bothering her after that (e.g. throwing her head up in the air and leading our other horse in a prancy gallop around the pasture), we prayed that everything would be fine for her to go on her trip later that week. Everything seemed fine, and her Coggins test came back all clear, so we loaded the horses in the horse trailer and away we went!

(As is the case with most problems with horses, that was likely our fault for not managing their food intake strictly enough. After being brown all winter, the pastures all turned bright green with spring grass in March—and you have to introduce horses to all that fresh grass slowly, or they can overeat and get colicky. Between that and us trying to give them the last of our sweet feed and cracked corn before they left [we gave them each normal portions, but Sugar had a bad habit of storming our other horse out of the way so she could eat most of his], she'd probably overeaten and not gotten enough exercise afterward. Watch your horse's food and exercise, folks!)

But we were blessed that everything turned out okay, and we did it! The horses were great travelers, and seemed to like looking around when we stopped in the parking lot at Kroger.

(Fun fact: You can mispronounce Kroger as Kay-roger. Or, if you use a French accent... Krogé.)

Cue another packing montage (this time set to intense fantasy action music with the occasional clip of Nyan Cat), a lot of heavy lifting, and... a litter of puppies!

She had eleven! She's a first-time mom, too, and she did great. Some of those puppies weighed an entire pound within two days of being born. (Probably one of these chunky monkeys.)

We managed to convince the nice buyers of our house to let us stay an extra week, so we weren't carting newborn puppies across the country. They were still only about ten days old when we went, but they were great little travelers!

So was the mom—it turns out she likes French fries, chicken fingers, and Greek yogurt, so she might've gotten a couple snacks on the way. Rest assured, we're actually completely responsible pet owners. (Really, she only got a bite of each because she looked very sad and hungry. I was making a sacrifice. Those were awesome chicken fingers.)

Everybody else traveled well, too!

When we finally got Out West™, some new homeschooler friends of ours were nice enough to let us camp on their property.

And in case anyone is wondering, staying out in the country with a family of teenage boys is nothing like Wattpad portrays it to be. It's more like:

me: *goes outside*
me: *gets hit by a pinecone*
me: ??
youngest brother: oh, sorry. is your brother out here yet?

oldest brother: Ugh
his mom: Did you run into a problem?
him: No, there's just a snake in the shower.

another brother: *comes over to show us a small snake caught in a juice jug* Isn't he cool? He just went right in!

me: *gets hit by two more pinecones*
me: I'm a neutral party; I'm a neutral party! Think Switzerland!

them: The good news is, mom made pizza! The bad news is, it has eggplant as the crust.

them: Do you want to play manhunt with us? We just need one more person, and we'll have equal teams!
me: *awkwardly trying to figure out how to explain that I'd actually rather continue sitting around eating ice cream instead of running around in a rocky field after dark*

youngest brother: Why did the old man fall in the well?
youngest brother: He didn't see that well.

...and late nights around the campfire in which they told stories of when they did really silly or reckless things and we all exchanged really bad jokes. It was a lot of fun—homeschool families are always really nice. Though I'm a little glad we're camping by ourselves now, if only because I prefer not having to change out of my pajamas just to go check on the animals at six in the morning. ;P

We had also ordered some more Buckeye chicks (yes, online! And yes, they arrived through the mail), which came while we were there. We didn't have our heat lamp with us—or electricity, for that matter, which kind of helps if you actually want to use said heat lamp—so we kept them in a plastic tub in the shower where it stayed fairly warm. (It turns out that gallon jugs full of hot water work just as well to keep chicks warm, with the added bonus of not blasting light 24/7 so the chicks can actually sleep at night.)

Right now they're out in the chicken coop we brought, though for a while we still had to put hot water in their house at night. They look pretty happy!

(Please pray for this little rooster, though—he had spraddle leg in his first few days being here, and although we splinted it, he's still having trouble walking and balancing properly. It seems to be something about his hips, which don't feel dislocated, but they do stick out pretty far when he wobbles.)

(They've grown a lot since then! They have all their feathers in now, except for the little rooster, who has bald patches on his back and under his wings. Poor little guy.)

Then we did personality tests for each of the puppies, reconstructed the fence on the dog pens about eight times after their mom kept somehow climbing out, cleaned up trash, took the puppies on several adventures so they could start learning to guard sheep, stopped at a swap meet, and celebrated Pentecost/Shavuot. (Not to mention while still caring for/breeding my rabbits, feeding the puppies every few hours, taking care of the baby chicks, trying to figure out how to cook at high altitudes [nothing? cooks?? like I'm used to??], and being kept up at odd hours of the night by a cat who thinks it's fun to knock things over and splash most of the water out of his dish.)

I'm also buying two more rabbits (pedigreed Rexes; they're so pretty!), one from thirty minutes away and one from thirty hours away. (...Okay, I don't know if it's thirty hours for sure, but we have to go check on rentals/visit family 13 states away, and a really reputable rabbit breeder is 12 states away, so I'm getting to buy one from her. Whoo! Super excited about that!)

Two of my does had litters a few months ago, too. One had eight and one had three, but both lost one. The kits were really pretty, especially a blue kit I was excited about!

All was going well for the first week... then, I came out to check on them one morning, and two of the litter of eight had died.

It had been cold that night, and they were laying in the front of their nest box, pretty far away from their siblings.

Okay, I figured, that's sad, but sometimes it happens, and it did get really cold last night. I'll have to work harder at tucking them in the back at night. At least the little blue kit made it!

The next day, the rest of the litter was doing fine. It can get ridiculously hot during the day out here, so instead of curling up in the back, the babies had spread themselves out around their box to take their daily naps. They were all wiggling around like they should be, especially when I picked them up—the sign of a vigorous, healthy baby bunny.

I came out a few hours later, and they were all dead.

I... still don't know what happened? Their abdomens were well-rounded like they should be, so their mom was feeding them well. None had any mucus or discharges, or broken bones or marred skin that I could feel. They were just... scattered around their nest box, cool to the touch, already starting to stiffen. It was late afternoon, so they certainly didn't die from the cold. It wasn't a very hot day, either—it might've been 75°-80° in the shade, but newborn animals are supposed to stay around that temperature.

The only thing I can think of is that their mom's nose was a bit wet and runny that day and the day before—which can happen when they're too warm, but also could've been the sign of allergies or a germ that was bothering her. (Thankfully not the snuffles, since the runniness was clear and only lasted about two days.) Maybe she caught something and passed it to the kits? Could there have been some plant in her new hay that contaminated her milk somehow? I couldn't figure it out.

The tiny litter was doing fine, too—except one kit was perfectly normal, and one was gargantuan and growing at a crazy speed.

Here he is at one week old—already seven inches long. His normal-sized sibling was barely pushing four inches at the time, which is a normal size. I guess the giant one's insides must've been fragile from growing so quickly—he started passing blood one day and died shortly after. (This is why I try not to inbreed, and why I really kind of wish that the guy I bought my rabbits from had given me at least one unrelated/more distantly related pair. Though, both does have had litters before—five kits each that grew up healthy and perfectly fine. I wonder if the lack of oxygen up here in higher elevations could've been something the babies had trouble adjusting to?)

But anyway, sad bunny stories aside, I'm finally getting a few fully unrelated ones, so hopefully that'll fix those problems! (If you ever see a pedigreed lilac otter or blue chinchilla doe for sale, please let me know—those are the two I'd love to find!)

...And yes, if you haven't noticed by now, I'm sort of an eccentric livestock breeder. Sorry. Turn back, it's too late for me. I love animals and genetics!

I'm also going to try to get some more English Orpington chickens, which are huge, docile, and gorgeous when all their feathers are in. I'm really excited about that, too! I might be able to buy a silver-laced trio, and possibly some Black/Blue/Splash or Jubilee juveniles. (Update: Score! I got a silver-laced quad, which is even better than a trio. Getting them home was such a funny story that I'm saving it for another chapter. ;D)

Here's our red-barred rooster and buff hens from before:

(Those are the four roos I hatched myself! Grumpy, Beep, and the Grapefruit Twins. Don't worry, I didn't name them.)

(And here's a hen feeling threatened by a tiny bantam.)

I'll post pictures when I have my new rabbits! And possibly kittens. Did I mention my cat is finally pregnant?

(She really needed bred six months ago, but my male is so awesomely easygoing that he had no idea what to do before now. He mostly just followed her around and meowed whenever she tried to get his attention. Ragdolls are almost too incredibly docile—but that's part of why they're the best cats ever!)

(My intact male is still a big, sleepy teddy bear who loves being snuggled with. He hasn't sprayed so far, either. Hooray for gentle, non-territorial cat breeds! *throws confetti* *because seriously, that's something to throw confetti about*)

That's actually not even close to all of what's happened this year, but I already hit the picture limit and am at 4.3k words, so I'll put the rest of the pictures/stories in the next chapter if anyone wants to see them. Or even if you don't want to see them! If that's the case, sorry in advance—I love spamming people with pictures! *throws pictures like more confetti*

I really apologize for not coming on during all that—I've been living in our camper with my family for most of the last few months, so I haven't had much of a chance to go anywhere by myself and even think about what I need to write. (There aren't really any isolated places on an RV, which is sad. Otherwise, it's not too bad! Not a lot of space for three cats to stampede around in, but not too bad. XD)

(I really, really do apologize for disappearing like that. I did need a break from Wattpad and the Internet to focus on real life and finishing high school for a while, but I should've at least found the time to finish writing up my Big Long Replies before now—the people who messaged me back when all this craziness started deserved way faster responses than this. I'm very sorry, guys! I need to suck it up, put my head down, and just communicate. Gah. Let me know how I can make it up to you all!)

On the bright side, Pine Wolf is now at 12k words! On the why-can't-I-write-short-oneshots side, it still has a half-dozen scenes to go, and it NEEDS FINISHED. SOMEONE PLEASE SMACK ME IF I DON'T MAKE TIME TO FINISH IT THIS MONTH. IT'S GETTING SO LONG BUT IT'S KIND OF SLOWBURN SO IT FEELS LIKE I NEED EVERY SCENE.

(IT'S SO LONG THAT WATTPAD'S LAGGING WHEN I TYPE IN THAT DRAFT. HELP.)

More good news is that heyyy, guess who finally graduated! *makes excited hand gestures motioning to self* (Yeah, had to do summer school this year since I fell behind this spring. Got it done, though! Whoo!) I do have some more Foreign Language studies I need to do to fully complete the course, so I will continue doing that. Still thinking about college, too, maybe for next year. Anyone have college suggestions or tips?

So... yeah! It's felt like a whirlwind these last few months. You could say it's been a busy year. XD

All that said, WHAT DID I MISS

HOLEY SWISS CHEESE IS ORDER OF THE CRESCENT EYE OUT ALREADY?

NOT WHAT HE WANTS IS OUT ALREADY??? HOLY COW WINGS, YOU ARE A WRITING FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH

AND THERE'S NEW CHAPTERS OF ODD SQUAD CIVIL WAR

AND EMERALD HAS ANOTHER COOL RANDOMNESS BOOK OUT

EXCUSE ME GUYS, I'VE GOT SOME SERIOUS READING TO CATCH UP ON