Author: Re-Farmer

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

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I’m feeling very fortunate right now! For ourselves and for the critters.

When I checked the weather first thing this morning, my app’s weather radar was showing us well under an area of snowfall, and yet when I looked out my window, there was none coming down! We did have some during the night, and it started up again later.

The extra water bowls were completely covered. :-D

Funny how the cats all like to crowd into one side like that; even the ones that don’t get along well with others! :-D

They were quite happy to have warm water! The heated water bowl keeps it from freezing, but what we bring out is warm to the touch, and they really like that, this time of year!

We’re having a warmer than predicted day today. We’ve been hovering about -11C/12F for most of the way. As I write this, the wind chill is only -17C/1F Not only does that make life easier for the critters, but the lovely snowfall we’ve been getting is much needed, to help the water table recover in the spring, from last summer’s drought. Hopefully, this will keep up, throughout the winter. Especially the mild part. The city we moved way from was at -35C/-31F this morning! While we are expected to get colder over the next couple of weeks, we’re not supposed to drop below -30C/-22F during the day. After being hit with polar vortexes through January and February, the last couple of winters, this is a welcome relief for us – and our electricity bill! Even so, this house is so inefficient, the furnace is on a lot. Not that it makes much difference upstairs, but the little ceramic heaters my husband got for them is making a huge difference.

Oh, before I forget!

Keith got his last anti-biotic dose last night, so his treatment is complete, and he is the picture of health! This is such a relief. The vet was pretty sure she’d seen a heartworm in the ultrasound, but not completely sure. The fact that he’s doing so well now, on just anti-biotics, confirms that it was “just” an upper respiratory tract infection that had him coughing up blood. His breathing is completely clear now, but he is quite upset with us and his nightly doses! It never did get any easier, and by the end of it, he was getting very hard to find when it was time for his medication!

All the cats, inside and out, seem to be recovered. There are just a couple of indoor cats we sometimes hear having a coughing or sneezing fit, but I don’t usually see which one it is when I hear it. No more crusty noses, either. On the down side, they’re all really active again, and Fenrir has discovered that she can jump straight up into the tree hanging against the wall! I don’t know who did it, but last night I heard a noise and when I came to check, the bottom of the tree was on the ground. I didn’t even know it came apart there! The tree doesn’t come down until after Three King’s Day, so we’re going to have to keep monitoring it.

Anyhow.

We are still getting snowfall warnings, and my desktop apps keep flashing red alert symbols at me. From the weather radar, though, it’s already well past us, and there is no more visible. The road crews will be out, which means I should be able to run some quick errands for my mother, and pick up some more deer feed. I don’t leave much out, and the birds eat quite a lot of it, but we still get regular visitors. There’s a doe and her almost adult sized baby that comes by every morning, and yesterday I saw a buck going past my bedroom window. He antlers are just growing in again, so he had these 6 or 8 inch long spikes sticking out of his head. :-D

We are in a nice, quiet and boring time of the year right now, and I’m quite appreciating it! We’re making use of it to plan what we’ll be ordering with our “seed” budget, next. I’m done ordering actual seeds right now, and the girls and I have been talking trees and bushes. A lot of the nurseries don’t start taking orders until January, though, so their websites are still filled with “out of stock” listings, so it’s hard to make decisions right now. It’s only a little bit longer to wait, though. Until then, we can still plan!

The Re-Farmer

Still celebrating!

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Of course, we’re into the 12 days of Christmas, now, so we’ll be celebrating until the Feast of the Epiphany, aka: Three King’s Day, on Jan. 6. :-)

Even the kitties get to celebrate with special treats from the kitchen. I’ve got more in the fridge waiting for them, too. :-)

We did our big dinner on Christmas Eve and I was planning to bring a turkey dinner to my mother’s on Christmas Day. My sister (who belongs to a denomination that doesn’t celebrate Christmas) brought my mother over to her place for a Christmas dinner. I’m glad she was able to do that, and that my mother was up to the trip. So I visited Mom today, instead. I still brought her a turkey dinner for later. When getting groceries for her for the last while, I noticed she hasn’t been getting any protein, so I brought her one of the 2 pound packaged of ground beef from our freezer pack, too. Since she’s just feeding herself, that should last her a while.

I am happy to say she really liked the crochet mushrooms I made for her!

She even commented on how much it looked like her drawings. :-) I’m glad she liked them. She had wanted them carved of wood, but it turns out she meant for the younger of my brothers to carve them for her. He does chainsaw carving out of repurposed cedar power poles. He makes really great morels, but I’m not sure how he’d have chainsaw carved porcini mushrooms using his tools and techniques! :-D

I’m glad I was able to visit her today. We’re getting heavy snowfall warnings for tonight, into tomorrow. It doesn’t look like the worst of it will reach as far north as we are. After that, the temperatures are supposed to drop quite a bit again, ranging between -20C/4F and -27C/-17F for the highs. Mostly closer to -20C. Still pretty average for this time of year. I will make sure to get another grocery trip for my mother in there, at least. I don’t want her to be going out in these temperatures, if I can help it!

It’s going to be a nice, quiet Christmas season for us, which is just how we like it. :-)

The Re-Farmer

In the Christmas Spirit: Il est né le Divin Enfant

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Another childhood favourite. I remember singing it in choir, using what little French I learned in school to figure out how to pronounce the words, but barely understood the lyrics. It didn’t stop me from belting it out in church!

Waiting for the first star

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It’s Christmas Eve today, which is when we have our non-traditional Wigilia dinner. The meal may not be very traditional (we don’t go meatless, for example, and we certainly don’t have 12 dishes!), but we do traditionally wait until the first star is seen before we begin.

Or best guess, considering it’s overcast today. It’s also only -2C/28F! Several degrees warmer than forecast. It’s supposed to drop right down again by tomorrow, but we’ll see. We were also supposed to get a storm last night, and that never happened, so who knows? :-D

Nosencrantz, enjoying yesterday’s sunshine.

Yesterday, we got together to take our annual family photo to make a digital Christmas card. After much fussing with the DSLR under horrible lighting conditions, we did get something useable. ;-) Only one cat in the photo this time, though. :-D

One of the things I pushed to get done was a Christmas gift for my mother. She has been asking for a carved mushroom, sketching out mushrooms that she remembered from her childhood in Poland. I haven’t been able to do any carving lately, though.

So I crocheted some for her!

It’s actually pretty close to her doodles, too! It took a while for me to figure out that she was talking about porcini mushrooms (she knew them by another name, of course), so I spent some time looking them up to get an idea of what they looked like at different stages and angle, and even found some crochet patters on etsy for them. I didn’t use a pattern, though, and just winged it. The challenge was finding a way to have the stem going into the cap. When stuffing it, the whole thing wants to be a big ball, but I found a way. Then, when stitching the cap to the stem/underside pieces, I used the extra sewing yard to try and secure it into shape on this inside.

Which is not easy to do, from the outside!

I had to make do with the colours, though. I would have preferred a darker brown for the cap, and more of a cream colour for the stems, but brown is not a common or popular colour in the yarn department at the best of times. Still, it’s fairly close.

I made two circles for the base, with the top one ever so slightly larger than the bottom one. After sewing the mushrooms together, then sewing to the larger disc, I stitched the base pieces together, lining up the edges, which created a sort of dome shape. Using two strands of yarn and the double layer base, it’s now quite stable.

I hope my mother likes it. I expect I’ll get comments about how she wanted it carved from wood, but who knows. She might be on one of her good days. I hope to be able to swing by and drop it off on Christmas Day.

Since I got the ink we needed and our printer works again, I wanted to print out our digital card for my mother, too. I picked up 4×6 photo paper, and will be able to print out a photo for my PAL application once I get that done (I’ve given up on trying to go somewhere that does passport photos). To print on the smaller size paper, we have to use a rear, manual feed tray in the back. We’ve never used it before.

I should have gotten standard sized paper and just cut it.

I ended up spending hours fighting with the printer! First, the paper loaded from the rear got jammed. The display screen said it was jammed in the front. I couldn’t find it anywhere. I had to stop to do something else, so my husband fiddled with it. He ended up tipping the printer on its side, just so he could see, finally found it tucked above a plastic flap and was able to pull it out.

Once back at it, I tried again, but the printer kept taking the regular paper instead of the paper loaded in the manual try. Or getting jammed again. I finally managed to get a test print right, and was able to print out the photo card for my mother – well past 2am! But that’s done, and I now know how the stars, planets and the moon need to be aligned to get the idiot thing to print on 4×6 paper loaded from the back.

Ugh.

In the middle of all this, the girls and I worked out a plan of action for today, which I started as soon as I was done with my morning rounds.

Laser beams!!!

The longest thing is the turkey, which is in the oven now. I’ve also got mulled wine happening in the slow cooker. Once the turkey is done, the girls will pretty much take over the kitchen. The layout makes it difficult for there to be more than one person working in there at the same time, but they’ve worked out how one of them can stay trapped on one side of the stove, doing the perogies, while the other does the stuff that needs more moving around as she works on garlic braised brussel sprouts. I’ll take on bringing stuff from the old kitchen for them. Not only is that where the freezer is, but this time of year, we can use it as a spare fridge. My younger daughter made coffee panna cotta for today’s desert, and that’s where they are chilling right now, along with the rum eggnog they made last night. Which was really, really good!

So while we’ve got a bit of a lull before the chaos starts, and we have our Wigilia dinner. I wanted to pause and take a moment to say thank you to all of you who take the tame to come visit our little corner of the interwebs, and share your lives with us, too. It’s really appreciated!

I wish you all a wonderful and joyous Christmas, filled with food, family and friends. May you all be blessed as we celebrate the birth of Jesus, the greatest gift of all. <3

From the Re-Farmer family to yours!

Got it done!

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The last couple of days have been pretty good.

Agnoos, checking out Aunt Rolando Moon, in the tree above. :-)

Bright and sunny, and not much wind chill. My husband was even up to going outside to feed the cats. I didn’t find out until today, that he did it in bare feet and with no coat! Yeah, he’s one of those people that wears shorts in the winter, but bare feet??? Yikes!

He’s been chastised thoroughly on that. He’s diabetic, and doesn’t feel his toes at the best of times!

Yesterday, I made a small shopping trip, giving my mother’s car a run in the process, to do the Walmart part of our shopping. Today, my younger daughter and I made it into the city and did a Costco trip – but not before swinging by the post office and picking up a very large, very light box for my husband. He ordered a whole bunch of plain, medium weight yarn, in bright colours, and plans to get back into knitting. :-)

I haven’t been up to doing Costco in a while, now. With the colder temperatures, we did that part first. No worries about the van baking in the sun. Even with insulated bags and ice packs, anything frozen would be starting to thaw, just from the trip home. This time of year, the insulated bags are as much to keep things from freezing, as they are keep them cold! Then we hit the international foods store where, among other things, I was able to get a free turkey with my points. :-) We’ve already got a turkey thawing out for Christmas, and we’re doing prime rib from our quarter beef pack for New Years, so it’s just there for when we want something other than beef. :-) My daughter had her own shopping list, too.

Which means that we have been able to do the bulk of our monthly shop for January, and without having to buy much meat at all, it meant we had the budget to do things like finally buy a set of pans to replace the ones we’ve got that, after getting the new glass topped oven, we discovered were no longer flat bottomed! :-D

I even was able to swing by a Staples and buy the cyan ink I needed for my printer. The ruddy thing simply stopped working when it ran out, even when I just wanted to print in black and white. In fact, it wouldn’t even do the automatic head cleaning anymore, so once I installed the ink and did a test print, there were all sorts of gaps in the blocks of colour, and there was black in the yellow! I did 5 test prints, and it was still really bad. I couldn’t do a sixth test print, though.

I’m now out of yellow, and almost out of magenta.

I know head cleaning uses up a lot of ink, but not that much!

*sigh*

So we still can’t use our printer. None of the places we usually shop at carries the ink I need, so that means another trip to Staples. It might even be worth it to make the trip tomorrow.

*sigh*

I don’t remember the last time I’ve gone shopping this close to Christmas!

We have always had pretty modest Christmases. For us, it’s about celebrating the birth of Christ together as a family. My husband’s sister was finally able to move back to this province and get a house in the city (she had to back out of buying a house here earlier in the year, when the province she was living in clamped down on their police state and no one was allowed in or out of the province. At least if you were Canadian) and she’s having a Christmas dinner. She knows my husband can’t manage that sort of thing anymore, so we’ll be doing a Skype call with them, instead. With how crazy things have been this year, we aren’t doing gifts at all. Not even hand made ones. Maybe we’ll do some for Three Kings Day, our last day of Christmas, instead.

We got the last things we needed for our Christmas and New Year’s dinners. Since we normally make pretty much everything from scratch, we are all excited about getting boxes of mixed frozen appetizers. Our once a year treat! :-D

It did make things challenging when it came time to unload, though. Most of the stuff was small enough, or flat enough, to fit, but then there was that turkey… :-D It was like playing Tetris with packages of meat to get it in there.

So, aside from a possible trip to get that ink (which might wait until after Christmas, but I’ll need to do it soon), we are DONE!

It feels good.

The Re-Farmer