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. :-)
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
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 was awesome meeting the delivery in a parking lot, like we were doing some sort of drug deal. :-D
So, 125 pounds of packaged cuts, plus the extra breakfast sausages we picked up, fit into four boxes, which also fit perfectly into our little utility wagon.
One box was almost all beef bones. The plastic bag has the sausages. I’ve never made bone broth before, and I’m really looking forward to giving it a go!
One box had stew meat and different cuts of steaks.
It has been AGES since I’ve had a good steak!
A third box was all roasts and ribs, and the fourth was all ground beef.
We did have things in the freezer before putting this in, but right now, it’s mostly beef in there. I kept out a couple of packages of breakfast sausages to thaw out, and also took a prime rib roast for the fridge freezer. We’ll be having that for New Year’s.
I’ve never done prime rib before. It’s going to be awesome!
We won’t be getting a lot of frozen stuff when we do our big shop before Christmas – there’s hardly any room left!
We’re shooting to get a half pig for next fall. Which means that, unless we get a bigger or a second freezer, or start canning quite a lot of meat (which I plan to do), we won’t have room for more than a quarter beef as well. I’d like to get a half beef next time, though, so that is something we will keep in mind over the summer. My parents had two freezers; one just for meat, and one for everything else. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a second one, though we’ll have to figure out what we want to take out of the old kitchen to fit on. We’ve got seating in there right now, to enjoy in the summer, but didn’t really use it much.
We’ll figure it out.
For now, we are well stocked with enough beef to last us for a good while!
Yes, we were a lot warmer than yesterday. Technically, it was -10C/14F when I went out to feed the critters.
Stepping outside was like being smacked in the face with ice. We have GOT to do something about that gap in the wind break from the south! I think the wind chill was at around -23C/-10F at the time, but it sure felt a lot colder.
Then it started snowing, and for a while, I considered rescheduling the shopping trip with my mother. However, we were supposed to warm up even more by this afternoon, and it’s supposed to be our last day warmer than -10C/14F for the rest of the year.
By the time I headed out, it wasn’t snowing anymore, but there was so much blowing snow, the highway disappeared for most of the distance. My mother’s car is such a light little thing, I was fighting the wind the whole way. At least the highway was otherwise dry and clear. The gravel roads and the streets in my mother’s town were icy, with drifts forming.
I made a point of putting some gas in her tank and grabbing some of her favourite chicken and wedges, and got there early. She had just come back from church and hadn’t started lunch yet, thinking I might just do that again. :-D So that worked out perfectly.
My mother was not actually feeling very well and had seriously considered skipping church this morning. It is right across the street from her place, though, so she did attend. By the time we were finished lunch, though, she decided to just give me her list and some cash, and I did her shopping for her. My mom is doing very well for 90, but she is definitely having a harder time of things. Especially in the winter! I’m extra glad I didn’t reschedule.
When I got home, I had quite the crowd, ignoring me as much as they could. :-D One of my daughters had just topped up the kibble trays. There are 13 cats in that picture, and I’m sure I saw at least 2 more at the window in their house. I must say, the outside cats are doing really well right now. There was a while when a lot of them were coughing and sneezing and had runny eyes, though none that had eyes that went blood red like Tuxedo Mask’s. Now, they are all hale and hearty. I think only Creamsicle Baby has a leaky eye still, and it’s been like that since he reappeared a couple of months ago. Some of the inside cats are still struggling with stuffy noses and sneezing, but they are getting better. Including Keith, which is a huge relief. I’ve been setting up the heated pad that we used while Ginger was isolated in the sun room, before and after his amputation. I think he remembered it, because he’s been using it fairly regularly. The others take their turns on it, and it’s not unusual for me to glance over and find three cats, with only their chests on the heating pad, enjoying the warmth. :-)
As much as I’d like to turtle, disappear into my shell and not go out again until next year, we’re going to have a few trips to make over the next few days. I even remembered to plug in the van and my mother’s car, just in case things turn colder than predicted.
We’ll have the quarter beef to pick up tomorrow, then I expect to go into the city the next day. I plan to do some gift shopping, so I intend to head out on my own, which means likely another trip before Christmas for the girls to do any last shopping they need to do. Hopefully, we will then, finally, not have to do any more long trips until after New Year’s.
Though our high of the day is expected to be a relatively mild -17C/-2F, when I headed out to do my morning rounds, it was -22C/-8F.
The cats actually didn’t seem to mind it too much!
I counted only 15 this morning, though. I also got to pet the Distinguished Guest a bit.
Thankfully, there wasn’t much of a wind child, but even so, changing the batteries on one of the trail cams this morning was not fun! I had fingerless gloves, at least, but my goodness, the tips of my fingers were feeling the chill by the time I was done!
Tomorrow (Sunday)_, we’re supposed to warm up to -7C/19F, then it’ll drop right back down again. Monday is supposed to be -18C/0F, but the wind chill is supposed to reach -27C/-17F.
I’ve got word from where we ordered our quarter beef, that they will be getting cuts from the butcher that morning, so we are now scheduled to pick ours up at 5pm. We will be doing a bi city shopping trip next week. This is intended to be our January shopping trip, so we don’t have to try and do it at New Year’s. Thankfully, CPP Disability always comes in early in December, so we can do that. When it was arranged to pick up the meat at 5pm, I considered heading into the city in the morning, but it’ll be much colder that early in the day, so I think I’ll put that off until Tuesday. It’s much closer to Christmas than I would like. I dislike shopping at the best of times, but around Christmas and New Year’s is the worst. However, it needs to be done. Our van does not like the cold, so if I can save the trip for when it’s a few degrees warmer, I’ll wait. Yes, we do have my mother’s car as a back up, but it’s not big enough for our city shopping trips. Especially with all the bags of cat food! :-D
I look forward to a time when we are so well stocked, we can skip the city shopping trips more most, if not all, of the winter!
I made a quick trip into town this morning and this is what I found when I came back.
Six cats, all crowded together in the window!
Yes, six. Can you see the last one?
I think all four of Junk Pile’s kittens are in there, plus Butterscotch’s Bradicous and Chadicous. We’ve never been able to quite single out Junk Pile’s grayer kitten from the other ‘icouses, plus there is one we think is Ghost Baby’s. We’ve never actually seen her with a kitten. Her hideout is somewhere in the outer yard, possibly under the storage shed. We just had an extra gray tabby kitten show up at some point. :-D
The terrarium heat bulb is just above and behind them. The timer is set from dawn to dusk, with the light sensor facing this window, which means there is probably too much light for it to be on at the moment. Which is likely why they are all piled together like that!
I am so thankful my brother and his wife gave us their old dog house. The cats just love it, and it’s so fabulous that it’s wired for electricity, too!
In other things, I made my trip to town early to pick up a few things, expecting to go to my mother’s this afternoon. I got a call from my brother last night and found out she was expecting me to come over soon to help her with shopping, but she was also almost out of milk. The grocery store near her no longer carries milk in 2L plastic jugs; just cartons. The cartons are more difficult for her to handle, so she’s been buying only 1L cartons. I picked up a 2L plastic jug for her, along with our own stuff, then called her when I got home. Well, it turns out she hadn’t even opened the milk she’d bought the last time I was there until this morning, so she was fine. We worked out for me to come on Sunday, instead. Looks like my daughter will be making lots of panna cotta over the next while! :-D
Of course, we talked about quite a few other things, including our vandal and the upcoming court case. She apparently thinks he’s going to have 10 witnesses against me? For what, I have no idea. He told the court he’d have 4, but who knows what he’s telling other people. Anyhow, there was something he’d said the last time he called her, several weeks ago, that she forgot to tell me. Apparently, he’s dying of cancer, and it’s because we’re trying to put him in jail. ??? He’s left phone messages with her in the past, saying things along the lines of how us “trying to put him in jail” was somehow killing him and destroying his health. Of course, he has no thought about the effect the stress of what he’s doing has on my mother and her health. Her comment was, if he’s dying of cancer, why does he want more farm? Good point, Mom! Still, claiming to have cancer is a new one he’s trying to blame us, that’s for sure.
Well, I guess we’ll find out in court at the end of January.
At least we have adorable cats to help with the stress reduction!
We dropped from 0C/32F yesterday, to -16C/3F today – with a wind chill of -27C/-16F! I did NOT want to do a dump run today, that’s for sure, but we weren’t able to get it done on Saturday, since that’s when my awesome brother came over to mount our Starlink dish on the roof. So today, it was!
Since we were out anyhow, we swung by the post office. I am expecting my Baker Creek order in tomorrow, but I still got seeds, today! My second order from Heritage Seeds was in! That was really fast. :-D You can read about our first order, here, and our second order here.
There was an extra packet of seeds in there – and this time, I noticed the “free gift” sticker. I went back to our first order and, sure enough, the extra packet of seeds we’d found last time did have the sticker, too. I just missed it entirely!
Of course, I had to look up what it was they sent us! This is their description for “Gold Ball Turnip”.
Gold Ball Turnip (1854) (aka Orange Jelly)
Introduced around 1854, this wonderful heirloom turnip has yellow fine grained flesh and reaches peak flavor when harvested at 3” although the yellow globes will reach 4-5” at maturity. Great storage variety. One of the best tasting turnips. (45 days to maturity)
I had been considering turnips as a good storage vegetable. It’s not something we normally buy, but not because we don’t like it. We just like other things better, and I usually get rutabagas instead, because they tend to be smaller. However, no grocery store carries this turnip variety! I look forward to trying them. It certainly meets what we look for when deciding what to grow.
This order coming in was just the thing I needed to cheer me up on a chilly day!
We are having another mild and foggy day, and the kitties were out in full force!
I think I counted 19 in total, out of the 20 that are now regulars. I even got to pet the Distinguished Guest again. Earlier, before I headed outside, I spotted her by the bird feeder. The suet cage had fallen to the ground, and she was trying to get at the suet!
Tuxedo Mask is looking great. In fact, all of the outside cats seem to be doing very well right now.
Butterscotch followed me around while I was doing my rounds, really wanting to be picked up!
They had better enjoy the mild temperatures while they can. Today is supposed to be the last really mild day. At 0C/32F, we’re already warmer than forecast, but starting tomorrow, we are supposed to drop and stay between -10C/13F and -20C/-4F for as far as the long range forecast shows.
As for the inside cats, we still have a few sick ones that are learning to enjoy being in the steamy bathroom while we take our showers. Except Beep Beep. She does not like being closed up in such a small space at all! The rest tend to stay, long after the door is open again.
Keith seems to be doing well. Still not much appetite, but he’s been pretty quiet. No more throwing up, and except for a few spells, his breathing is quiet. We can tell he’s still not feeling too good, though, because he hides away. Currently, he’s under the couch. It took my daughters a while to find him! Usually, he’s in the bed we set up in the corner of my closet. I’m hoping this means the anti-biotics are working, and that he does NOT have heart worms!
We’re getting another warm day today. The forecast was for 1C/34F as the high, hte we were already at that temperature before it was fully light out! Now I’m seeing a high of 2C/36F for this afternoon, but I would not be surprised if we passed it.
The critters do seem to be enjoying the mild tempertures!
Chadicous, of course, was determined to be stepped on.
The heated water bowl was completely empty again. My suspicions that deer have found it were semi-confirmed last night, when I glanced out the kitchen window and saw one at the small gate in the chain link fence. No tracks that I could see around the water bowls, though.
While putting kibble into the trays in the kibble house, I had more cats coming for pets than for food. Including *drumroll please*
The Distinguished Guest!
Yes, I got to give our new addition a thorough petting and ear skritching. :-D I still can’t walk up to her, but at least she’s willing to walk up to me, now.
I even got to pet my brother’s dog, who came for a visit this morning, though the cats were not happy to see him! :-D
This pair of deer are morning regulars, enjoying the bird seed. It’s not the best photo I got of them with my phone, through the living room window, but when I saw the chickadee caught in mid flight, I just had to post it!
Later on, my husband looked out the kitchen window and spotted a big cat going by the barn, to the old hay yard.
And by “big cat”, he actually meant a *big* cat. Most likely a bobcat. I know they are around, but have never seen one, yet.
As for the inside critters…
… here is Keith, getting some major cuddles from Beep Beep.
Keith didn’t seem to have many issues last night. He was noisier while Beep Beep was lying across him than he was before. :-D My daughter has brought him into the bathroom with her so he could get a steam treatment while she showered. :-)
I don’t know if he’s any better. I can only say for sure that he’s not worse. Still not much appetite, but he seems to be moving around more. I think it will be a while before we can say for sure whether the anti-biotics are helping or not.
