February 16-22, 2020

Weather | 2/16, 23°, 43° | 2/17, 0.07" rain, 31°, 42° | 2/18, 25°, 39° | 2/19, 17°, 33° | 2/20, 10°, 27° | 2/21, 10°, 39° | 2/22, 27°, 52°

• Sunday, 2/16: Made a big waffle brunch. Mary still has a bad leg. She hot padded it a lot. Took tons of minerals and drank a ton of liquids. It was a little better at the end of the day. I did all chores, again. Checked my grapefruit wine. The specific gravity is 1.090, down ever so slightly from 1.093, but it's bubbling. I stirred it and tasted it...very strong grapefruit, bitter taste, plus quite sweet. I could hear the fizzing kick up by evening, so stirring helped. Churchill is doing better...eating healthy and able to walk outside. I put the RSS news feed app called Feedly on Mary's phone to replace the crappy Apple newsfeed that gives you breaking news like people upset because Jennifer Lopez wore nothing during the Superbowl halftime show...we don't give a rat's ass!!! Mary is happy that she can now select news she wants to see. Most of the snow melted today.


• Monday, 2/17: Mary still has knotted leg issues, but it felt better in the morning. By nightfall, she was tired and it was tightening more than ever. I did all chores, fixed meals, did dishes. We had chicken sandwiches as our main meal. Checked the wine...specific gravity at 1.080, so it's coming along. Churchill ate all meals and is doing better. Rain in the morning made everything mushy, even though it wasn't much, since nothing is seeping into the ground.


• Tuesday, 2/18: Mary is doing much better...not perfect...but she's doing stretching exercises and getting around more. She even fed pets (accept for Churchill) in the evening and helped with fixing meals. I cleaned resin off the chainsaw chain, walked down to south of the Bluegill Pond and just west of our lane and sawed up a dry dead mulberry tree that fell into the base of a big oak tree. It's super dry. I also fell a dead dry white oak and cut it up. Stacked all of the wood and I'll get it tomorrow when the ground is frozen. Saw the skull of a deer with a big rack on it in that bit of woods. It probably was shot nearby by our neighbor, Rich, and then went there to die. Rich isn't a good shot. I also saw a dead blue jay that I thought at first was a piece of blue plastic. While I was cutting up firewood, Mary fed chickens and found an opossum in the coop. She collected it up in a plastic garbage can and hauled it to beyond the swim and dove ponds, using the shovel as a cane. Checked the wine and specific gravity is at 1.068. It tastes like fancy soda pop...a little sweet with tingly effervescence. It's bubbling quite nicely, now. Mary drew up a shopping list. She texted Bill and he said he's arriving here on Thursday at 11 am...going back home Sunday.


• Wednesday, 2/19: Mary baked a cherry pie. I went shopping in Quincy for human and pet food. Mary's doing better, but with a lot of stiffness. Wine specific gravity is at 1.064 and fizzing well. Discovered a crack at the top of the hydrometer I've been using. Checked with a different hydrometer and it read 1.070. I'll use the cracked hydrometer, even though it's probably compromised.


• Thursday, 2/20: Mary is better today, moving around quite a bit. Bill arrived at 11 am. Mary fixed a turkey dinner that we ate mid-afternoon, celebrating my 63rd birthday. Mom called. She really enjoyed her recent visit to Arizona and Nevada. Katie called, but we didn't talk much because of poor telephone service. I racked my wine, since the specific gravity was at 1.040 in the morning and 1.034 in the evening. It was at 1.040 on the good hydrometer in the evening. You're supposed to transfer the wine to a second fermenting vessel (rack it) when the specific gravity is between 1.040 and 1.020. Bill helped. We filled a 1-gallon glass jug and had a third of a quart that I stored in the fridge to fill after future rackings. I had problems with the new solid rubber stopper, so I went with an old stopper that isn't solid. Mary, Bill & I drank what was left. Unique taste...tasted good...grapefruit taste, slight bitter with tannin taste, with the feel of champagne on the tongue, due to yeast fermentation. The yeast sludge gave me a stomach ache, but not so for Bill and Mary. See the fermentation in video below.

• Friday, 2/21: A low day for me, since I nursed a stomach ache from last night's wine tasting. Note to self...stay away from yeasty wine must...feed it to Mary, instead. Bill did a basket of his laundry. I asked him to include 5 pairs of my socks, since I was out. Mary made a pumpkin cake. We had another possum in the chicken coop. Mary and I put it in a plastic garbage can and took it to Wood Duck Pond. She's doing even better, today. We watched the movies Super 8 and Angels and Demons.


• Saturday, 2/22: Thousands of snow geese flew over us heading west today. I could even hear them going overhead at night. We discovered that the big freezer got turned off a couple days ago. Items in the baskets at the top were thawed, but meat in the bottom was frozen. The store-bought chicken breasts were in the baskets, so we added it to pork loins that we roasted outside on a fire in the afternoon. Bill shared some 5-year oak barrel aged dark beer that he got as a present from his friend, Mike. It was really delicious stuff. After chores, we watched the movies Shrek II & 2 episodes of the BBC Cadfael series.