Jan. 10-16, 2021

Weather | 1/10, 20°, 27° | 1/11, 29°, 39° | 1/12, 26°, 46° | 1/13, 30°, 47° | 1/14, 37°, 39° | 1/15, 1/2" snow, 0.06" moisture, 27°, 33° | 1/16, 28°, 33° |

• Sunday, 1/10: More Clouds
  
  • So far, January is cloudy for us. Today was another overcast day.
  • Mary baked 4 loaves of bread.
  • Mary put the 2 amaryllis bulbs into new soil and larger pots to start them for the season. They look healthy. 
    
  • I worked up a batch of Lalvin D47 wine yeast by adding 2 ounces of pumpkin must heated to 97° every half hour, and then every hour, to activated yeast over a several-hour period. By 7:30 p.m. it was bubbling nicely, so I poured it into the brew bucket.
  • Katie walked just over 1.5 miles on our lane. She said her new shoes are nice and fit well, which is rare, since her feet are very narrow. All of her burn scares are healing nicely.
  • I split about 1/3 of the wood in the machine shed.
  • We watched the 2009 movie Leap Year, a request by Katie.
    
    
• Monday, 1/11: Splitting Firewood
  
  • Mary and I split the rest of the firewood logs that were in the machine shed. We were at it for 2 hours. We created 3 stacks of dry wood and 1 stack of wet wood at the west side of the machine shed that we'll soon move.
  • Today was our first sunny day of 2021.
  • FedEx delivered a package to Katie...a first in them actually getting something to our house.
    
  • Mary made spaghetti for our main meal.
  • The pumpkin wine is bubbling nicely (see below video) and the specific gravity dropped from 1.093 to 1.087, so the yeast is working. It tastes good. Mary says it tastes like dessert in a glass.
    
    

• Tuesday, 1/12: Firewood Shuffle
  
  • Mary and I moved firewood. First, I moved the dry firewood in the woodshed to the west wall. Then, Mary shoveled and swept up bits of wood, bark, and a mouse nest. I put down persimmon sticks, and we stacked new dry wood into the north end of the woodshed. That stack is back to waist high. I also moved firewood in the machine shed that was once wet, but now dry, into the woodshed. Next, we stacked wet wood in a crisscross stack along the machine shed's north wall to dry. We used wheelbarrows, instead of the tractor, so we wouldn't dig up the soggy lawn. This all took about 3-4 hours.
    
  • Mary did 2 loads of laundry.
  • We had hot venison sandwiches for our main meal. Mary cut into the first of the red bull onions and they were crisp and nice, like they just came out of the garden.
  • I checked the pumpkin wine. It's fermenting vigorously with a specific gravity of 1.068. Katie took a tiny taste and really liked it. 
  • I ordered a new cigarette lighter plug for the portable air pump I keep in the Cadillac. The one I bought at Walmart didn't work once I soldered it into place. Online research revealed that I probably need to reverse the wire connections, but I also realized that the faulty old plug was a 10 amp plug, whereas the newer one is a 5 amp plug and therefore too weak. I ordered a stouter marine 10 amp plug from an Ohio marine supply company that's almost 6 times the cost of the Walmart one, but better built and safer.
    
    
• Wednesday, 1/13: Bag Worm Elimination
  
  • Mary picked bag worms off 2 cedar trees next to the lane. Last summer, they almost killed one cedar tree and multiplied profusely to a point I was seeing them on my little apple  rootstock trees. We have a long ways to go to eliminating them out of all trees in or near our yard.
  • Mary washed sheets and furniture covers. 
    
  • The pumpkin wine's specific gravity was at 1.055 at noon and 1.050 around 7 p.m. I'm sure I'll be racking it tomorrow.
  • I changed the Cadillac's oil and oil filter and topped up all fluids.
  • UPS delivered a package to Katie and she gave her mother a new Kindle, since Mary's current one has a weak battery. Instead of changing a battery in a Kindle, you just buy a new Kindle. Now, Mary has a spare when her current Kindle dies.
  • We watched 3 Downton Abbey episodes.
    
    
• Thursday, 1/14: A Wine Day
  • Homemade wine is moved (racked) from a flour sack-covered brew bucket to an airlock-equipped glass container when the specific gravity is between 1.040 to 1.020. As yeast eats up sugar in the mixture, the specific gravity goes down. At noon, the pumpkin wine's specific gravity was 1.028, so I racked the wine. A pumpkin contains more juice than I anticipated, so I got an extra quarter gallon of wine requiring me to use two one-gallon glass jugs (see photo below). Fermentation is very robust (see video below). We tasted the fines leftover after racking the wine. It tastes like Mary's pumpkin cake.
    
  • A type of bandage applied by the Mercy Burn Center in St. Louis came completely off Katie's skin donor site on her thigh. This is a good sign that it's healing. She's looking better with all of her burns and healing nicely.
  • Mary made chicken noodle soup and a cherry crisp dessert. She said with increasing cloud cover, it seemed like a chicken noodle soup day.
  • We watched 3 more Downton Abbey episodes.
  • It started snowing right before we went to bed.

  

  Pumpkin wine after racking from brew bucket.
  

  
  

• Friday, 1/15: Another Wine Day
  
  • I racked the garlic wine into a new glass gallon jug. It was perfectly clear, so I bottled the wine (see photo below). For the first time, ever, I tested the wine's acid content using both pH litmus paper and my new titration kit. The pH papers measure all acid in the wine, whereas the titration test measures the strength of the acid that can be tasted in the wine, or how tart the wine tastes. The garlic wine has a pH level of 4 (low acid for wine), but a titration level of 0.95% (high acid). The pH strips are very old, so the titration test kit, which is brand new, is more accurate. The test meant no acid addition was necessary. I filled and corked 4 bottles and put a partial bottle in the refrigerator. We tasted the leftovers after racking the wine. It really makes you feel like you should be eating pizza or shrimp. It tastes good.
  • Katie did some weight exercising. Plato and Amber aren't used to someone using weights to exercise and they both got all worked up until Amber was woofing. 
  • Mary did some cross stitching.
  • Mary got a book that we ordered Dec. 1st. We suspect the book seller never initially sent it and realized the mistake once we asked for a refund.
  • Mary read a couple books while Katie and I watched 2 episodes of Downton Abbey.
  • It snowed ever so slightly all day.

  

  2021 garlic wine.
  

• Saturday, 1/16: More Gray Skies
  
  • We had 3 sunny days this month. Today was another gray and cloudy day.
  • Mary made flour tortillas and we had what she calls eggrettos for our main meal. 
  • I texted with Mom. A couple days ago, a fire started near the Lindsay, MT area and gusts to 70 mph meant several acres burned. I looked it up and found this link.
    
  • I went through old files on a big zip drive I have and threw several away...a lot of it was writing we did when we were freelance writing between 2009-2017. It was far from Pulitzer Prize material...more like pullet surprise writing.
  • Katie did her weight exercises, again. Our dogs can't seem to get used to it.
  • We watched a northern harrier hawk fly overhead in the strong NW winds, today.
    
  • We played Yahtzee on Saturday Game Night. Katie had amazing luck. She won, I was second, and Mary was third.
  • We watched a Downton Abbey episode that caught Katie up to where we were a couple weeks ago.