Yesterday we went to do banking, stopped at a couple of other places, made a quick run through the grocery store, and came home to put the groceries away and had lunch. Then we were off to sell our load of scrap metal, 1800 pounds of it. They unloaded it with a big magnet, a disc about 3 ft in diameter hanging from a big trackhoe. Before they got to us, it was picking up big bites of metal from a pile with a 4 clawed thing, that could have picked up our truck! Then the operator had it grab the magnet, plugged a cord from the magnet into the boom of the trackhoe, and carefully took the load out of our pickup. I sat in the truck cab and watched through the window.
The magnet is activated electrically, so after it was placed on top of our load, suddenly the metal rose up and stuck to it, then it was picked up and the machine swung it out away from the truck to drop the junk on a pile. It took about 4 lifts and 2 or 3 minutes, to empty our truck.
On the way there and back, about an hour trip each way, I was reading an old book by Catherine Marshall, titled To Live Again, which starts with her loosing her husband suddenly to a heart attack, and how she adjusts to life as a widow and gets a book of his sermon's published. I'm only about 1/3 of the way through it. It is a book I believe Sharon who writes here in the Writer's Corner, would like, as Catherine had wanted to be a writer before she married, and never thought it would happen. In those days, after WWII, not many women had careers, so she didn't persue it until after her husband died. She went on to author about 20 books of her own. I plan to read several of them this winter.
Today started out at 22 degrees. Our snow only stayed a day, so I need to dig more potatoes and more weeds. It's laundry day too, I will wash 2 loads and have then ready to hang up when it gets a little warmer. The sun is shining, the wind isn't blowing and it looks like it will be a nice day.
Tomorrow we will be gone all day, another adventure, maybe.
It was a kind of long day, but a good one. The first tractor dealer, in a town about 2 hours from us, was a young fellow, not too familiar with all the available equipment, so he had to make a bunch of phone calls and ask questions. Their inventory was pretty low, but they did have a snowblower in almost new condition, so we have made a tentative deal on that. It's 6 ft wide, so a couple of passes on our driveway would clear it of snowdrifts. The problem is, Idaho has sales tax, and we don't want to pay it. They say it doesn't matter if we live out of state and they deliver it, we would still have to pay it. We say nonsense, so we'll see where that deal goes. A little time might make them see it our way.
Then we went back into Oregon, to another tractor place about 50 miles from the first one. They had a much bigger inventory. The salesman is in his 60's and has worked with tractors as a farmer and with the dealership for a lot of years. He knows what implements fit which tractor, how it all works and where is is sitting on the lot. We bought a little tractor with a front end loader, a backhoe and a rototiller! The little tractor will run all of them. We have a loader on our big tractor, but it doesn't fit in small spaces. We have lots of uses for the backhoe and the tiller on this tractor will be better able to handle our clay soil, plus, I won't always be able to wrestle the troybuilt tiller to turn it around, so this equipment is a good investment. We'll never wear any of it out. They have an excellent financing program, no interest for 60 months. We knew just what we wanted when we went looking, and didn't have any pressure to buy anything we hadn't asked about.
We had lunch between tractor stops, then went to Home Depot, and got home after dark and dinner time for the critters, who were glad to see us. We never did get down the road to Boise and the Penney's sale. That would have taken another 3 hours which we didn't have. It's just a long ways from anywhere to anywhere else in our area.
Last night just before I went to sleep, I could hear a fox barking. The voice is lower pitched than a coyote but not quite like a dog. Three quick barks, repeated over and over with maybe 10 seconds between each series. Was he getting an answer, or just hoping?
A few days ago, while reading the ingredients list on a package of rye crackers, I thought, rye flour, water, salt, yeast, hmm, why does this 9.2 oz package cost almost $4.00? No reason that I could see. The coop store sells rye flour, so yesterday I bought some, and this morning I made a batch of crackers. There are many recipes available online for crackers of all kinds, but I didn't find one that had all rye flour.
So, using the basic recipe I found as a guide, I modified it a bit, used half whole wheat flour, half rye, cut down the oil by half, and added a little yeast. Now they are out of the oven, broken into rectangles and squares along the score lines I drew with the point of a knife before baking. They weren't very dry, so I put them back in the oven for a few minutes, (still around 400 degrees) and after 10 minutes I turned the sheet of dough over and left it in the oven for another 10 minutes. That helped, so I called them done, broke them into pieces and put them on cake racks to cool.
The flavor is more whole wheat than rye, but good. I took a sample out to hubby who is burning weeds today, he said they are good. However, I will try again, using white flour instead of whole wheat, because I really wanted crackers that taste like rye crisp.
I washed sheets and planned to hang them outside to dry in the sun and gentle breeze. Hubby's weed burning project put an end to using the clothesline today. When he started, the wind was blowing the smoke away from the house, but just before I headed outside with the basket of laundry, I noticed it had changed direction. So I changed direction too, and the sheets are drying on the folding clothes rack in the living room by the woodstove.
My vegie garden did get dry enough to rototill, thanks to a few dry days with a bit of sun and a lot of wind. So, I pulled the tiller out of the shed and did the job, finishing up when it was so dark I could only see the edge of the garden where the dry grass starts. It might be the last time I use the Troybuilt tiller to do the whole thing, since we will have the small tractor in a few days. I had wanted to do the job with the new rototiller attatchment, but didn't want to take a chance on the weather. The forecast for the next few days isn't too promising, however, it said mixed rain and snow today and we have sun, a fairly clear sky and no precipitation at all so far.
The only precip we have had since I rototilled the garden was just a light shower. So much for the forecast which said we would have the possibility of something falling on us for several days.
We now have the little tractor. It was delivered this morning. I drove it around a little to get familiar with the controls, filled it's little bucket with weeds (dumped yesterday's wheelbarrow load from the flower beds into it) and took it down the hill below the garden to deposit the load on the burn pile. There are a lot of things about this tractor that are different from the big one, so I will be a while getting comfortable using it. We moved a few things around in the hay shed to make room for the little fellow. Big and little, sitting side by side, look like Mutt and Jeff.
Yesterday morning just after daylight and before sunrise, we watched 2 young does in our big pasture. One jumped the fence into the smaller pasture, then walked along the outside of the rail fence looking into the yard. We stood still and watched, with the house lights out, while she made 3 trips along the fence, looking for the right place to jump, but also watching and probably communicating with her friend. We watched as she stopped and wiggled her big fuzzy ears. She also had quite a good crop of white chin whiskers which showed up very well from about 20 ft away with the sky getting very light behind her.
Eventually the other doe jumped into the small pasture and walked about halfway to the yard. That gave the first doe confidence, and she jumped into the yard, nibbled at a rose bush and made her way across the back sidewalk and around the house. She'd obviously been here before! The other doe was thinking about jumping in, so I went out and chased her away. Boing, boing, BOING, over the fence she went, and they both ran across the small pasture, jumped the other fence into the big pasture, and ran over the hill out of sight.
On Wednesday, hubby raked a bunch of dry weeds away from a couple of our old trees, made a couple of piles a safe distance away and burned them. In late afternoon the weather changed and we got some rain, more rain or snow forecast for overnight, and 25 degrees. Thursday morning the cat knocked something over at 5am, I got up expecting to see a plant from the windowsill on the floor, nope. I went back to bed for another hour and listened to the wind. When I got up again, I looked out the window, and behold, there was a tree on fire!
Things and people moved fast after that! We strung out hoses, one had ice, so had to get another one from the shed, found a couple of those pistol grip nozzles that direct the water so well, one needed a washer, hubby squirted water on the tree while I found a washer for the other nozzle, and finally we were able to attack it from 2 sides, which got rid of the flames and produced lots of smoke. The old tree has been there for over 100 years, behind the old house we tore down, and although the thing is still alive, it has hollows in the trunk. The fire was inside the tree more than outside. Sort of like a giant chimney fire.
After we knocked the fire down, we were peering through the thick smoke trying to find the hot spots. Of course we couldn't see much, so could only stick the nozzle into the tree trunk, angle it upward and squirt water all around in the cavity. From time I could hear the fire flare up, and then a kind of sizzley sound when I hit the right spot with the water.
I got the tractor and raised hubby up in the bucket so he could squirt water downward into one of the higher holes that was spewing a lot of smoke. When we couldn't see any more hot spots, we came into the house for dry clothes, finger thawing and something to eat, then hubby went back out to continue the assault. Every couple of hours for the rest of the day we sprayed water on everything. I shoveled a big wheelbarrow load of charred wood and sawdust out of the center of the tree. This tree is certainly old, it is about 8 ft in diameter at the stump, and has a huge hollowed out, charred center, large enough that I could stand up inside! However, it is not my idea of the perfect tree house. That tree, along with another black willow about 20 ft away, shaded the old homestead house for many decades. The newer section of the old house had newspapers on the walls under the wallpaper, dated 1897.
As I was doing one last check of the tree on Thursday night after dark, I spotted a hot spot in a 2 ft in diameter limb. It was above any place where smoke could get out. I squirted water toward it through a small opening about 10 ft off the ground and could hear it sizzle. The wind had stopped and so I hoped that either the oxygen supply would run out, or the water that got into the cavity would put it out. While looking for hot spots behind funny little ribs of charred wood, I spotted a couple of tin cans, pulled them out and there behind them, completely covered with wood from the outside of the tree, is a big round metal thing. How did that get there? On the outside of the tree, near that place, is a rusty piece of barbed wire.
If the tree dies, well, how could it live after this?, we will make firewood from it, but will borrow our friend's metal detector before we attempt to cut into it. Who knows what else might be imbedded in that tree?
Thurdsay night I didn't sleep much, got up several times to look out the window to make sure everything was dark out there. In the morning daylight, I could only see one small wisp of smoke escaping, and by mid morning there was nothing.
Apparently the fire from the weed piles got into a tree root and followed it to the tree overnight despite the rain, then burned through into the hollow trunk where it had more fuel and wind to fan the flames. Anyhow, no harm done, but we both prefer to wake up in a more leisurely manner.
So we went off to town to do our volunteer things, took hubby's heavy, wet, sooty and smokey jacket to wash in the front loading machine at the laundromat, and did some major grocery shopping, including a 20# turkey for 23 cents a pound that is big enough to feed the family that will visit us for Thanksgiving and stay until Sunday. He is frozen solid, and went directly into the freezer to rest for a week before I need to start thawing him. One of the supermarkets has this kind of special price on turkeys if the customer spends at least $50. That is very easy to do.
While we were in town the snow started, and by the time we started home, the ground was covered and the streets were getting slick. We have just enough to cover the ground here. Overnight temperature last night was 20, and the forecast high today is 32, so it won't be going away. We can't remember a year when the snow came and stayed this early. It must be the result of global warming. Ha!
Warmer temperatures and wind melted our snow, so we are back to greens, yellows and browns for a while. Snow and rain are in the forecast for the next week, and although the forecast said 80% chance of that wet stuff today, we haven't had anything but wind. This morning about 5 the wind came up very strong, some gusts shook the house. One of the odd things I noticed, was that the water in the toilet bowl was moving with the gusts as the wind changed the pressure in the vent stack.
Today I bundled up in my insulated coveralls that I wear during lambing season, and dug the last of the potatoes. They filled another 5 gallon bucket, that makes 3. After that I picked up windfall apples, filled 2 buckets with those. I'll be doing a lot of peeling, trimming and slicing to make cobbler sized bags of them for the freezer, and some applesauce. The horses will love all the trimmings and peelings.
Hubby was supposed to have an appointment with the heart specialist yesterday, but we got a phone message late Friday that it needed to be rescheduled. We had already made arrangements to drive back to Idaho and pick up a 6 ft wide snow blower that we will put behind our old tractor to clear our driveway this winter.
The next stop was Home Depot in a nearby town with our kitchen counter measurements. We selected countertop material, not formica this time, it will be granite! It's sealed and guaranteed for 15 years. It took quite a while before we decided what color, and since granite is expensive, and permanent, I sure hope we like it. The formica lasted 16 years and has chips along the edges in a couple of places, and it coming loose in other places, and also has knife marks where somebody didn't use a cutting board, and stains where the finish wore off. We will put 4 inch ceramic tile on the walls behind the stove, sink and around the corner where the coffee pot sits on the counter. It will start at the counter top and will be 7 tiles high. The kitchen will certainly look different when it is done!
Nothing will be done about the countertops until after Thanksgiving weekend because there isn't time before. We will have our daughter, son in law, their 4 adult children, 1 husband and 1 boyfriend here through Sunday. Our son and daughter in law who live in town will probably also be here at least part of the time, and also a fellow who is one of our extra kids who lived with us when he was growing up. Sometimes kids just need a family, this one did, and although he was about 20 at the time, he is slow mentally, so it was as if he was about 14. We are the only family he has, so he tries to get here for Thanksgiving and once or twice in the spring or summer.
After we did our deciding at Home Depot, and the clerk entered all our info into their computer system, we went to have a late lunch. We were hunting for a certain place, drove past it, then went down the street a couple more blocks to find a place to make a U turn. And in so doing, we found a nursery we didn't know was there, and decided we had to check it out after we had full tummies.
It is a family owned and operated business, and occupies a building that has parts that were built in 1910, and some more recent ones, like the sunroom. This is no ordinary place, it has unique displays, and even an indoor gazebo with 1/2 x 1 inch wire on it, and song birds living in it! I would dearly love to have a bird cage like that one! They also sell bulk vegetable and flower seeds, their seed drawers are a set of old card catalogue drawers from a library, with oak fronts and brass handles. The store also carries a unique line of hand tools for gardening. We'll go back next spring. They gave us a beautiful calendar for 2010, and I told hubby that the trip would be worth it just for a new one every year! Of course we would have to make another trip in the fall for that, but I don't think we would mind at all.
About 4am I heard the sound of frozen precipitation hitting the windows, and since I wasn't sleeping anyhow, I got up to turn on the porch light and see for sure. We have about an inch or so, and now, after numerous sun breaks and more flurries, it appears to have stopped. Hubby says the forecast indicates that the next 3 days will be nice, and so it might go away.
Yesterday I was still working on cleaning a flower bed. I thinned out a bunch of wild roses along the fence, taking out the older canes. Now that job is almost finished, with maybe 5 more feet to go. I was running out of daylight yesterday, and had cold feet and fingers besides. The pile of trimmings is still on the lawn, waiting to be taken down the hill to the burn pile. I'm hoping for a few more days with decent weather so I can keep going on it, and dig out more weeds, trim the edges, etc. It still looks pretty shaggy in places. A couple more weeks of warmish, dry weather would be wonderful, but probably won't happen until about April.
Meanwhile, I am still working on those buckets of apples, slicing and freezing them for cobblers this winter, and I also need to make applesauce and apple butter. The house needs some cleaning before our family arrives for Thanksgiving, so there is no lack of things to do.
Here it is December already! How did that happen? Today is a beautiful, calm, cold, sunny day without wind. I've been working outside, and still have daylight so I will go do more in a few minutes.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with the family. Daughter and son in law, and two of the girls arrived late Wednesday. One of the other girls (the RN) had to work until 11pm on Thursday, and the married one was at her inlaws for Thanksgiving day, so they left early on Friday morning and were here by soon after lunchtime, weary but happy to be here. The nurse's boyfriend is a theology student in Portland. He came with them and brought his laptop so he could write a paper over the weekend. We had our turkey dinner on Friday, then had plenty of leftovers for the rest of the weekend.
Saturday was a beautiful day, so we all got outside for some exercise and to trim some trees, burn brush piles, move firewood around, etc. In the midst of all that, hubby and I had to go to a memorial service, but we still had about an hour of daylight left when we got home.
In the evenings we played board games, and watched some movies. Being early to bed and early to rise people, hubby and I didn't survive the movies, nor did we try very hard.
Although we made some effort to have hubby's post heart attack diet be low fat, it didn't always happen. Pie in 3 yummy flavors just has to be sampled, but he didn't have ice cream on it, so that wasn't all bad. I made the dressing using vegetable oil instead of butter to saute' the onions and celery, and the turkey drippings were skimmed well before I made the gravy. He prefers white meat anyhow so the turkey wasn't a big problem either. Through the weekend there were several bowls of crackers, chips and dip, but he sampled those sparingly, so I think he came through 4 days of feasting without much damage to his diet.
Tomorrow (Dec 3) I will have a basal cell carcinoma taken off my face by a specialist in Boise at the skin surgery clinic. They have more diagnostic tools than my local doctor's office, and will be able to examine the removed tissue with very specialized techniques to be sure that all of the cancerous part is out. I've heard of people having their local doctor do the surgery in his office, and having to return another time or two to have the rest of it removed, and my own doctor told me he could do it or send me to a specialist, so I opted to have it all done right the first time. If you read this before tomorrow morning, please send up a little prayer for me. I know it is no big deal to some, but I am a real chicken when it comes to medical stuff.
Yesterday's sunrise wasn't much to look at, too much smog and a bunch of low clouds in Boise, but on our way home I did watch the sky turn bright gold above the Owyhee mountains where I have done a lot of riding, then turn bright orange before it faded away. We were in heavy traffic at that time, making all of 15 mph, and I was sitting there using a very cold bottle of water like an icebag. I missed the sunrise this morning. It's pretty cloudy but partly sunny, and started out at about 10 degrees. No more digging after several nights like that, the ground was almost two hard to get weeds out of two days ago, so my shovel can go back into the shed.
Here's an update on my day at the skin surgery clinic.
It went quite smoothly but was time consuming. First they got my face numb and did a biopsy, bandaged it, sent me back to the wating room. About an hour later I went back in and they removed most of the mass, put a pressure bandage on me and sent me back to the waiting room. The tumor is then treated with some coloring agent that turns the cancer cells a different color. By studying the edges of the removed material they can see if they got all of it, nope, they had me come in for another tissue removal, then more waiting. When they had me come in again they said they had it all out, and at that point sewed me up and I was outa there. It's 2 1/2 hours to go there, plus we had rush hour traffic in Boise, then when we left the clinic it was rush hour again. We got home about 6:30. We left here at 4:40am to be there at 8:30 Idaho time, an hour ahead of our time. A long day.
Wooooee! Do I ever have a colorful face this morning! My left eye is almost swollen shut, and I even have bruising on the upper lid and almost to my eyebrow! Good thing I don't have to go anywhere. And when I do, I think I will just tape a 4x4 gauze patch over the whole side of my face so I don't scare anyone.
The actual surgical site is about centered below my left eye, in that crease where we show sunburn when it doesn't show in other places. The tumor was about pea sized, half above the skin, and half below with deeper roots. I looked at the site with a mirror while the doctor explained what he would do to repair it. After suturing the wound together, inner and outer, he made a 1 1/2 inch diagonal dart going from the inside corner of my eye, getting wider at the surgical site, and narrower toward the earlobe. When I smile, that is about where the lines go, so after the color of the incision goes away, long after the bruises and swelling are gone, there won't be a very noticeable scar.
When my MD presented the options to me, I chose to have it all done in one day where they could determine if they had it all. Psyching myself up to have it done once was hard enough, without having to wonder for 2 months, have it reappear, do it again and again until all was gone wasn't an option I considered for more than about the time the doc took to tell me.
So glad to hear the surgery went well and you won't be having to have it done again.
A shame about your old tree catching fire. If it could only talk it could tell you all about life at your place in years gone by. Has the property been in you or DH's family all those years?
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