Quiet Saturday

Well, after the Homecoming parade, picnic, and game yesterday, Pat's birthday was down at the Hub. I got home at 1:30 AM, but got right back up at 6:30 AM as always. We are out of bread, so I needed to bake more. If changes happen the way I hope this week (further, deponent sayeth not!) I might have my time cut shorter than ever, so today I am baking two batches - one whole wheat and one oat batch.

Today is our 26th wedding anniversary. Mike is cleaning the 'stuff' out of his closet to go up into the attic - suitcases, an army cot, all sorts of things under the list of 'don't need now, will need later or someday'.

It was chilly this morning, and poor little Phydeaux's old bones just couldn't take it. So I put him in his turtleneck sweater, which of course he hates. But he has stopped his shivering and is nestled on Mike's bed. He dug his way under the comforter and sheet. It feels good to me - lovely and cool - and I am quite comfortable. Sasha is of course a walking rug - but she got so jealous when we put on Phydeaux's sweater that apparently she wants one of her own! LOL Dogs.

Looking forward to the real cooler weather....

Beans Tonight

Ummmmm. I love baked beans.
But I don't just pour 'em out of a can, uh-uh, no way. First I fry up about a pound of those ends and pieces of bacon til it is crispy. Then I toss in some onion, and brown it. Then I mix up my sauce - I can't tell you what is in it of course, but it is sweet and tomato-ey with a peppery spicy tang to it. I cook that a little bit til it gets almost like caramel, then add the beans, stir well, and either bake or simmer til done. With cornbread or home fries - you have a meal.

There used to be (and maybe still is) a brand of beans that comes close to mine called (I think) Big John's. It started with some of the same stuff I do, but somewhere along the way they lost that additional bite, that flavor tang. Maybe its all that bacon grease; who knows?

So since we went to town this AM, I fried up some of those end pieces to make bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwiches (with homemade oat bread, toasted) for a quick lunch - and used the rest of the bacon to do the beans.

Think I'll make a BIG pot for the town picnic Friday, and see how it goes over. They have to know the new girl can cook, after all! And maybe some itty bitty corn muffins, too....

The Onions! Are Up!!

Yup, there they were this morning. After an inch of rain last night (I'm surprised any hit the ground, the wind was blowing so hard) I had little green stems, about half an inch high, popping up in 2 neat little 25 foot long rows.

Ummmmm. Onions!

I finally managed to get out on the roof of the porch and paint my bedroom window frames. Then I had to repaint the basement door one more time; it really looks good. Mike was kidding me about the red rectangles on the door; I told him that since the door and the house were white, and on the north ( incoming snowdrift) side, we might need to find that door! Being very fastidious, he put a good strong molding around the door too, to help seal it against the weather.
So I painted that red, too. You can see it even behind the storm door. 'Way kewl.

I made sausage and gravy and biscuits and green beans for lunch, and then I cleaned up - really scrubbed - the kitchen. I love the smell of Ajax powder; so clean and 'bleachy'.

I went out and scrubbed that area rug one last time. The smell is gone at last. I need to hang it now instead of having it spread out on the pallet on the sawhorses and spray it down really really well one last time tomorrow; that should do it for the smell and the colors. It practically glows now.

Tomorrow we have to go to Valentine to pick up Mike's meds. We also need some cash - it's Homecoming on Friday, and we need to go to the town picnic and then the game. The picnic is free but the game is $2 apiece. Plus Pat and Cathy and I are going out again this weekend for Pat's birthday... I need to bake some more bread, there's only 2 loaves and some rolls in the freezer; I'll do that Thursday I guess.
So busy...
But - the onions are up!

Work and storms

Well, yesterday was supposed to rain, first in the AM and then in the afternoon/evening, and by golly it did! (I love Weather Underground - FAR more accurate than the Weather Channel -who diss us in the flyover states- or local advisories.)

So I was down in the basement all morning, testing and repairing Christmas streetlights (look, the Village takes a whole DAY to set up alone, with the train and all) and reorganizing my craft bucket while I was doing laundry. Ever wash 'snow'? well, my snow blanket had to be washed, and the miniature skating pond had to be finished, and I am working on a ceramic water feature for Enid (shhhh) using seashells and ceramic pixies. I've got all the 'plug-in' lights for my ceramics in one central place, as well as all of the feathers and ready-to-use decorations for the mistletoe balls and baby wreaths. I then put together another wizard and a dragon.

Then I made a big lunch, and carried the old door outside to set up for Mike to work on. We have a lot of old doors and trim and boards to play with, and the door into the basement from the outside needed replacing. It faces North, the side that takes the most wind, sand and snow in the winter. So we had a nice solid door downstairs, with good sturdy panels - all it needed was to have a new doorknob and some faults repaired and to be planed and sanded down a little. So I put it on the back of the pickup for him(wide area, easy to stand next to and work on), and Lake was in the corral looking depressed. I got the curry brush and went into the corral and started brushing her. Within 5 minutes I was surrounded by horses! Everyone wanted attention too. I felt like a teacher in a schoolyard - no, wait your turn, Lake gets hers first! Pretty Boy and Snip kept nuzzling my neck and elbows and back, while Willie just stood there patiently. There are honeybees everywhere, and a group of them decided it was time to harass the horses. There were four that stayed around Snip, and they were flying toward his legs, butt-first, to sting him! There was some kind of residue on the horses; like thick sticky pollen, and all I can figure is that the horses found a honeybee nest and had plowed through it. It was a little difficult getting them all brushed with them stamping and biting at the honeybees, but I did it. They all got their 'love' and neck cuddles and - then I went back to the laundry and the basement.

Mike called me when he was done and we took the door to the basement doorway and hung it. Then I had to take a break from the basement work - the door needed paint. So I got my white paint and the red for the trim and went to work. By the time I had gotten the first coat on, it started to cloud up - from the southwest, big black dark clouds. Arrgh. So I put the second coat on, and scurried back inside.

The wind picked up to 40 mph, and the warm air inside the house dissipated quickly as the cold wind blew through it. It was lovely and cool inside, and blustery and stormy outside. The lightning was incessant and the thunder rumbled across the hills, echoing. We got a little hail for about 20 minutes, and then the rain came. The wind was blowing so hard out of the West that it made a mist out of the rain! After about two hours, the rain stopped, the thunder faded into the east, and all was silent except for the slow drip-drip of water from the trees.

So today I'll put another coat of paint on the door, and drain the water barrels from last night. It is lovely and cool and clear this morning, 63 degrees, and no rain is predicted for at least 5 more days.

Best Laid Plans

Well, I WAS going to paint my bedroom window today. Fortunately it is big enough that I can crawl out onto the porch roof from the window, and even though it is slanted I can stand on it and work.

But today the turkeys were back, and a stray dog came up into the yard to chase them, and they went up into the trees. Tammy wanted pictures of her Dad in the corral, so I took them this morning while I was out taking pictures of the turkeys in the trees. Then we emptied the horse trough that I had brought up to the porch two months ago when it was so hot - Mike can't swim any more, but I wanted him to be able to sit on the porch and at least be able to put his feet in the water when he got hot. The sump pump put the water out to the poplar and ponderosa pines and the red dogwoods, while I watered the rest of the yard. Then... we decided to tackle the woodburning stove.

It is a cast iron stove, and as you can see there was a leak up in the roof that dripped down onto the stove - or, it would have, were it not for the cast iron pot on it. Unfortunately the pot had apparently overflowed onto the stove a couple of times, and underneath the pot was rusted some, too. The bottom pipe was rusted pretty badly, so it had to be replaced - not a fun thing to do! - and the cast iron would have to be cleaned.

Now, I've owned cast iron all my life, and the one thing I know about it is that, as heavy as it is, it rarely rusts through. You can take a rusty piece of cast iron, wire brush or steel-wool it down, and then oil it and heat it and it will come back black and shiny. Of course it takes a lot of effort!

Of course the pipe wasn't cast iron, so it had to be replaced. We'd bought the pipe, we just weren't looking forward to wriggling it out of place, and wriggling the new one in. There was a bird's nest in the cast iron flue, so we cleaned that out and reused the flue - not hard; drill two holes in the pipe and insert the flue. As rusty as the pipe was, the flue wasn't damaged at all. I thought it odd, though - we've had two fires in the stove since we got here, and the birdsnest didn't burn up! Another nice thing to see was that there was no creosote in the pipe, all the way to the roof vent 12 feet up. If a fire has very little smoke and the fire doesn't have a lot of green, damp, or 'oil' wood like pine, it will burn cleanly and not leave the residue that starts chimney fires and burns down houses.

It took us about two hours all told to do it - and then I spent another three hours scrubbing out the pot and lid, and seasoning them in the oven with oil, and then scrubbing down the stove and oiling it, too! So here's the finished project:

We got on the roof and "buttered" the roof seal with heat caulk; it had been tarred in place but the tar had cracked, hence the leak.

But we weren't done yet! D'ya see that little door in the wall to the right of the stove? That door is probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen, because it opens onto a wood box that has been built onto the back of the house. So I got the wheelbarrow and filled it with all different sizes of wood from the pile next to the garage, and then brought them over and stacked them neatly into the enclosed wood box. Mike helped me by breaking up the twigs into small pieces and putting them in a bag that we keep in the woodbox so that they are readily to hand. No spiders or other late night surprises in the house because of the wood indoors, and dry wood that is readily available without having to go outside, especially in snow.

If it doesn't rain tomorrow, Maybe I can get to that window and paint!

Turkeys, Paint, and Tacos

Here's what we saw first thing this morning in the garden -

The turkey chicks are getting BIG - ready to crown a dinner or two. I've been putting corn out to keep them around; now I'll aggressively put it out the last 3-4 weeks to help sweeten the meat and fatten the little darlings. I hate the feathers but I do love the meat!

And I did get up on the ladder and onto the bay window overhang to paint; now my house looks like a candy cane and seems so clean and pretty. It will make a perfect backdrop for my Christmas lights! See the scarecrow on the front porch? The garden where the turkeys were is on the right, right behind the East side porch, which we call "the verandah".

And since it's Mike's day to cook, he has planned tacos, burritos, and refried beans. This and the Hub are about as close as we get to "fast food" any more!

We went to Valentine yesterday, and the road back was so beautiful with all of the leaves turning bright colors. We want to go down to the river this weekend and take pictures of the glorious fall colors here. The reds and yellows are iridescent!

But right now, I've got to go turn off the sprinkler on the onions and get washed up for dinner!

Fear

I am NOT afraid of heights! (Yes I am.) Am NOT. I am afraid of falling, which is NOT the same thing.

I happily worked the night shift on computers in a 48 story building, and used to go up to the top to look out over the city to watch the snow come in like a rolling wave. Once we scurried up to the top to watch the newspaper warehouse burn, down the street from us - all those heavy giant rolls of newspaper could not be put out for hours, and it was awesome to watch, especially because it was snowing -hard! - at the time. I wished I had a camera, the shots were just amazing, clouds of snow and burning paper whirling about... I danced on the roof, loving the height and the beauty of the night. I love going up in a glass elevator on the outside of a building.

When I was a kid I was the original "yard ape", always up a tree and climbing higher. I felt safe in trees - lots of branches, I was a tiny thing, and I could climb higher than anyone else. When the wind blew I would hang on and rock to and fro with my tree...

But going up on a ladder scares the bejesus out of me. Long narrow ladder. Wide load butt. Topheavy front end. Paint can in one hand, paint brush in the other. Big flat feet that catch on rungs going up, slide around them going down. Why do they make rungs round? Good. Lord. I have to paint those window frames and the trim while it is still pretty out. Have. to. The house looks unfinished. I'm all there is, the only one, to paint or climb. The windows are too small to be climbed out of. It's all up to me. If I could, I'd lash a rope around my waist and rappel down the house, but I can't. So it's the ladder or nothing. I'm not afraid, I'm not, I'm not. (Yes I am.)

Remember - three rungs up over the edge at all times. Remember - angle it outward, the wider the angle the less chance of slippage. Who made roof tiles so slippery? Who thought gutters should be so fragile? Watch the window, idiot.

OSHA like the idiots they are say no ladder should be climbed after it is raised until it is tied off first. Tied off? Who's up there to tie it off? How did they get there without a ladder? OSHA. Paugh. What a typically brilliant, totally useless idea.

OK, my hands are gripping the window frame like it was my last dollar. I can't paint like this. Let go. Let. GO. Don't drop the brush. Don't drop the bucket. Don't drop the brush INTO the bucket. Put the bucket on the roof overhang. Careful - it's slanted. There. Paint out to the left. Good. Paint out to the right. Good. Paint very carefully in the middle. Good. Now climb back down and move the ladder three more feet and do it again. WAIT - don't forget the bucket!

I am not afraid of heights. Am. NOT.