Holidays

We have such good neighbours!

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I wasn’t planning on writing a post today, but I just had to share. What an awesome Christmas surprise!

When I turned on the tablet and the live feed to the garage security camera, there was something different about our driveway.

I could see grass.

We’d only been able to clear the driveway just wide enough for a vehicle to drive through, not wide enough to uncover any grass.

Someone had cleared our driveway, and we never heard a thing!

When I went out to switch the memory card on the trail cam, I could see that this was not done by our lovely neighbours, and the renters of most of this property. They would clear our driveway with their front end loader. These were ordinary tire tracks. I could see that someone drove in, clearing the driveway on one side, almost up to the burn barrel, backed up to turn around, then cleared the other side on the way out.

Of course, the first thing I did was check the memory card to see who did it and when.

It turned out to be a pickup truck with a plow attachment. It’s one I recognize and see every winter, but I’ve never been able to see the driver’s face. I had no idea who it was. Also, it was done in the early afternoon! We were busy making our dinner at the time. On the trail cam, I could see the truck go by and stop on the road, then back up to our driveway and go in, then out again – just two quick passes to widen our driveway. Normally, we would have had the gate closed and locked, but with this weather, we’ve been leaving it open. He basically took advantage of that!

So I sent a message to someone I figured might know who it was, and got a name of who it could be. I was able to send a message to that person, and it was confirmed. It turned out to be someone who was a neighbour when I was growing up, and still lives in the area, though now further away. I’ve known him for most of my life, but I don’t think I’ve seen him since we’ve moved back here. In fact, after all these years, I probably wouldn’t recognize him if I did.

We have such good neighbours! It so makes up for the problems we’ve been having with our vandal!

There is other good news. The littles are settling in quite well! Walnut already settled in almost immediately, but it getting even more exploratory. The bitty tabby is also getting better, and not running away quite as much.

Then, last night, I woke to feel a cat curled up against my leg. It was completely dark, but I could reach my phone and try for a flash picture.

Yup! It was the bitty tabby!

The bitty and Walnut have been wrestling and napping on my bed a lot more. During the night, I could feel them walking across me and the bitty – which I could recognise by the almost negligible weight – even curled up on my thigh to sleep. Then, this morning, I was able to pick the bitty up and snuggle him for a while, and he even settled in and start purring, rather than staying tense and running off.

Also, yes. The bitty is now confirmed male.

Unfortunately, we’ve still had no luck getting his sibling in the sun room. After my last failed attempt to catch it, it’s even more skittish. I was afraid that would happen!

It is already noticeably warmer out there, though. Not the actual temperature – at least not that early in the morning – but the wind has finally stopped! What a difference that makes!

While doing my rounds – and checking out the driveway! – I ran the van for a bit. My daughter’s Christmas gift to the family is going to be Chinese food. We’re pretty sure the place we usually order from will be open, but if not, we have a back up plan. It does mean driving to town, though, so I wanted to make sure to start the van and run it for a bit.

I just realized I forgot to plug the block heater back in. I’d better take Walnut off my chest and go do that now!

Yes. I have a little kitten curled up on my chest and napping as I write this.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

The Re-Farmer

For Christmas: Christmas Eve!

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Another medieval version.

In my family, Christmas Eve is when we celebrate the Wigilia feast. Whether you are starting your celebrations today or on Christmas Day, I wish you and yours a joyous and peaceful Christmas.

Good company

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If you’re going to have someone invade your space while you’re in the bathroom, you can’t do better than David.

He loves that sink.

He fills that sink!

What a chill, laid back, precious boy!

Then there’s these guys.

By the time I’m done my morning rounds, the outside cats have finished eating and are settling into their favourite spots to hang out. The littles just love sitting on top of the board the heat bulb’s fixture is attached to! They don’t hang out under the bulb, which you’d think would be warmer. They like to be above it!

While doing my rounds, I did a bit of shoveling, but the snow is deep enough, we’re going to have to clear the driveway. Not because it’s too deep to get out, but because I don’t want it to accumulate too much the next time it snows.

We’re supposed to get more snow today – 97% chance of precipitation – and a high of -11C/12F this afternoon. The next two days are supposed to have highs of -16C/3F, which still isn’t too bad. It’s the wind that’s going to make it miserable. After that, we’re supposed to start going below -20C/-4F, or close to it, probably for the rest of the year – depending one which app I look at. Another tells me we’ll be around -10C/14F during the week around Christmas, which is about half what my desktop app tells me. Well within the 30 year average, either way, so not a major concern. It’s January and February that are typically the harshest. The AccuWeather website has long range forecasts all the way to March 16 and, according to them, January and February are going to be downright tropical, compared to the last few years! If they’re right, we’ll be warmer than -10C/14F for most of those two months!

I’m not counting on that. 😄

It’d be nice, though.

I was happy to see the road seems to be well plowed. I say “seems to be”, only because everything is so glaringly white, it’s blinding. We’ll have no problems getting out anywhere, if we need to.

With the Christmas and New Year’s holidays coming up, it changes when my husband’s disability payments come in. CPP Disability, which typically comes in just a couple business days before his private insurance payment, will be coming in on the 21st. Which means (weather willing) that’s when I’ll be making a trip to the city for what will not only be our last Christmas dinner shop, for the fresh things we won’t buy in advance (we don’t really buy gifts anymore), but it will be our first large shop for January.

I’m not looking forward to shopping so close to Christmas, but it does mean we will probably not need to do any sort of major trip again until next year.

We can go back to turtling into our shells again!

The Re-Farmer

First Sunday of Advent: Hope

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Normally, we would have started more decorating for Christmas by now, but none of us it up to it, yet. As of now, I’m the least sick person in the household!

I did want to get our Advent wreath set up, though.

Normally, it would have tiny decorations added to it, and a white candle in the middle, but the ornaments are still in their boxes. So I added its mini light string, and stuck our miniature nativity scene in the middle.

We also usually set it up on a counter between the dining room and kitchen, but for now, it’s on the dining table.

We’ll catch up on the rest, later!

May this first Sunday of Advent see your heart rise up in Hope.

The Re-Farmer

Happy Thanksgiving!

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It’s Thanksgiving weekend, here in Canada. Thanksgiving is officially tomorrow (the second Monday of October), but we had our dinner today.

We did pretty much everything different this time! Including the turkey. I had hoped to brine the turkey overnight, but didn’t have the energy for it. Well. Mostly, my hands were hurting too much. Either way, we normally would just roast the turkey, covered in bacon. To keep the turkey from sticking to the bottom of the roaster, I would put a layer of some vegetable under it, depending on what I have at the time. An onion sliced into rings, long stripes of carrot, pieces of celery, that sort of thing.

Turkey takes a long time to roast, though, so I decided to try something different.

I spatchcocked it. Something I’ve done with chicken, before, but not turkey.

It’s surprisingly easy to cut that spine out, even with the pain in my hands.

Once spatchcocked, however, it no longer fit in my roaster. Using a baking sheet meant I could use a rack under the turkey. I still added some thick slices of the Tropeana Lunga onions we need to use up first, under the turkey.

For the bacon, I would normally weave the sliced right on top of the bird, but tried something different there, too.

In another baking tray, lined with a silicone baking sheet (parchment paper would have worked, too), I wove the slices from an entire package of bacon. That got topped with another silicone baking sheet, and then I used a heavy marble rolling pin to flatten it out. After removing the top sheet, I used the bottom one to transfer the bacon mat to the top of the turkey. The final step was to add some water to the bottom of the pan.

I forgot to take a “before” picture, but this is how the turkey come out after it was done.

It took a lot less time to roast it, too.

After the turkey was in the oven, I got the mixed vegetables prepared, then spread out on another baking tray and added to the oven about 40 minutes into the turkey’s roasting time.

The mixed vegetables included some Uzbeck Golden carrots (I didn’t want to use the Black Nebula carrots, as they’d discover the entire dish!), more Tropean Lunga onions, the last of our own potatoes, plus a few store bought potatoes, some Red Kuri squash, sweet potatoes and, of course, the sunchokes. That all got tossed with some salt, pepper, garlic granules, paprika and olive oil. It turned out awesome.

When the turkey and vegetables were getting close to done, we made a soup as well. Something else I’ve never done before…

Peanut soup.

When I was able to visit my brother not long ago, we had peanut soup for lunch. I’d never tasted peanut soup before! My SIL had spent a long time trying to recreate one that she’d had at a restaurant. A recipe for West African Peanut Soup was the closest recipe she found, and she modified it to get the flavour she was after. I was able to take a picture of the recipe she used, along with her own notes for the things she changed.

What we made was a mix of the original recipe, plus some of her modifications, and it turned out really well. Among the optional ingredients was shredded chicken, which we skipped this time. The instructions also suggested one way to serve it was over rice. My younger daughter helped me make it, and we both found it funny when, after her sister had some of the soup, she commented on how it seemed a bit like a curry, and that she was tempted to put it over her turkey, adding that it would probably be great over a bed of rice!

Once the idea was brought up, both girls did use the last of it over their turkey, and decreed it delicious.

This is definitely something we will make again!

By the time we were done our dinner, none of us had room for desert, so that waited a few hours. For that, we just had a purchased pumpkin pie and some butterscotch swirl ice cream.

Meanwhile, I’ve also set aside a turkey dinner, including the soup, to bring to my mother tomorrow. She should have enough to last her a couple of days. 😊

If she’s willing to eat it, of course. No mashed potatoes and gravy, this year. 😉

The Re-Farmer

Happy Easter!

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My daughter was sweet enough to take photos of Easter brunch from our basket for me to share.

She even used a couple of the Lavender Rose China we inherited from my late MIL as part of the display. She made it all look so pretty!

Unfortunately, my husband had an unusually bad pain day and was not able to join the girls. In fact, I don’t think he even ate at all until shortly before I got home. :-(

As for myself, I left early for my mom’s to make sure I had time to fill her gas tank first (gas prices have gone down a few pennies to 169.9 cents per litre). We had a short visit before walking across the street with her walker to her church. Having the church so close is one of the main reasons she chose to move to where she is! :-D It was an excellent service, and I quite appreciated the homily. After church, we headed out to my brother’s place.

There are two routes that I’m familiar with to get to their place. Normally, I’d take a more straightforward route on the highways, bypassing the city, to get to the town my brother lives in. My mother, however, insists on a route that takes us through a smaller city, where we have to cross an insanely narrow bridge over a major river. Which isn’t too much of a problem in my mother’s little car, but every time I take that bridge with our van, I feel like I’m either going to hit oncoming traffic, or scrape the guardrails! My mother is so insistent on taking the “right” route (which she thinks is a short cut), that when I got distracted and turned towards the city (my usual route) instead of the other direction to take a cross road to another highway, she actually got furious and started shouting at me for going the wrong way.

It took half a minute to circle around, and I was able to calm her down, but even for her it was a bit much to get so angry, so fast.

There turned out to be an irony about this.

Things were more pleasant as the drive continued. We got to the smaller city and drove through it to the bridge and…

It was closed.

Which… of course it would be. With the snow we’ve recently had, and the bridge being so narrow, now that I think about it, yeah, it would be. In fact, I would not be surprised to learn it was closed through most of the winter.

So we bypassed the bridge and got onto another highway towards the bigger city. However, in taking this route, we were passing through a more populated area, so the speed limits were all much lower. Which means that we probably ended up taking at least half an hour longer to get there than if we’d gone the route I almost took out of habit that she yelled at me for!

The irony was not lost on her!

When we realized the bridge was closed, I pulled over long enough to message my brother to let him know about the bridge, and that we would be a bit longer. As I was getting back on the road, I noticed it was just starting to snow.

The weather forecast for today was for either isolated flurries, or up to 6cm/2in of snow, depending on which app I looked at. Until then, the day had been completely clear. Within minutes, we were driving into ever heavier snowfall. Thankfully, it was warm enough that it melted as soon as it hit pavement, but visibility got quite poor in places.

When we finally got to the last leg of the journey, approaching a road I could have taken for a shorter route to my brother’s, we kept on going because it was blocked by a train! It was quite a while before we finally passed the end of the train, and I was actually starting to wonder if it would be clear of our next possible turn off when we got there. Thankfully, it was, so there were no more delays in getting to my brother’s.

The visit was absolutely fantastic. We had a fantastic time seeing each other, a wonderful dinner and, best of all, I got lots of baby snuggles!

So many baby snuggles.

Unfortunately, the snow did not lessen any and we left far earlier than we wanted to. It’s a good thing we did. While the roads were still good, they were very wet, and would have soon started to freeze. As it was, the further north we got, the snow was less, but I could see it starting to freeze over in places.

After dropping my mother off and continuing home, the highway was actually much better and almost dry, until I got about 5 or 10 minutes from home, when I drove into snow again, but it was just snowy enough to impact visibility a bit, not road conditions.

One thing we did see a lot of was deer! Not often. Just lost of them. On our way out, we passed a field that had maybe 20 deer scattered around it. On my way back, just as I was slowing down to turn off the highway, I saw what had to be at least 30 deer in a field. A group of at least 10 were just lying in the snow! I’ve seen some fairly large herds of deer in the area over the years, but this group was easily the most I’ve ever seen of white tail deer, all at once.

The girls were sweet enough to set aside portions from our basket for me, which was much appreciated by the time I got home.

I did notice that, by the time I got home, the kibble was all gone, so I topped that up before going in.

I saw very few outside cats this morning. As I was leaving, I startled a skunk, and it ran under the cat’s house. As I walked by, I could see it’s adorable, pointy little nose poking out, as it watched me leave. When I got back, there was another skunk – or maybe the same one – poking around the kibble house trays, trying to find something to eat.

Potato Beetle, meanwhile, remains in the sun room, and has his very own bowl of food that he doesn’t have to share with any other cats. Or skunks… birds… deer… When I got home, he actually made a “dash” for the door to get outside. He can’t dash very quickly right now, with his injured leg, so that wasn’t much of a problem.

What is more of a problem is the fact that the litter box remains completely unused. Which means he’s found a corner in the sun room somewhere that he’s using, instead. *sigh* It’s a good thing the sun room has a concrete floor!

Rolando Moon was following me around while I was doing my morning rounds, and enjoys running ahead, then rolling on the ground. I couldn’t resist sharing this picture, when I realized her tongue is sticking out!

What a silly kitty!

As I write this, we’re now heading towards 10pm. It’s still snowing a bit, and gotten cold enough for it to finally start accumulating. It’s not the first time we’ve had snow for Easter, of course, but usually that’s been when Easter was earlier in the month! Last night, we hit lows of -17C/1F, that I know of, and the sun room thermometer actually dipped below 0C/32F. Potato Beetle made use of the warming lamp and was just fine. Tonight, the low is supposed to be only -7C/19F, though the wind chill is supposed to be -14C/7F. Starting tomorrow, however, we’re supposed to reach highs above freezing, and stay there from now on, with lows barely dipping below freezing over the next few days. In a couple of days, we’re supposed to get a mix of rain and snow, but today’s snow should be our last blast of winter.

But then, we thought we were getting the last blasts of winter a couple of times now, only to have the forecast change, quite a lot, over and over! However, looking at our 30 year average, and record, highs and lows, I think we’ll be leveling off and warming up from now on.

Even with the snow, however, today was a fantastic Easter!

I hope you and yours also had an excellent day, filled with food, family and fun!

The Re-Farmer