Dec. 12-18, 2021

Weather | 12/12, 29°, 55° | 12/13, 33°, 53° | 12/14, 34°, 58° | 12/15, 55°, 71° | 12/16, 29°, 45° | 2/17, 0.03" rain, 21°, 37° | 12/18, 29°, 37° |

• Sunday, 12/12: A Quiet Sunday
  
  • Mary did 2 loads of laundry after I dumped all of my various hunting clothes into the basket. She also made a venison General Tso meal and did some cross stitching.
  • I set 2 buckets up to soak labels off wine bottles in a baking soda/water solution.
  • I also went through this blog and updated my wine diary for wines I made this year, especially comments about how wines tasted after they were bottled and aged. It's educational and fun recounting the making and enjoyment of various wines.
  • Today is the last day of the anterless rifle deer hunting season. We aren't hearing rifle shots close to us...only shots far away. There is an alternative season, from Dec. 25th to Jan. 4th, when you can use spears and black powder guns, but hunting numbers are greatly reduced. Who wants to hunt a deer with an atlatl on Christmas Day? (Atlatls are a rod or board-like device used to launch, through a throwing motion of the arm, a dart 5 to 8 feet in length.) The end of regular deer hunting season means we can walk around without blaze orange vests outside of our coats and without the fear some idiot trespasser might be lurking in our woods with a high-powered rifle.
  • I saw 2 bald eagles fly over our house just above treetop level.
  • The garlic wine still bubbles profusely. Its yeast is taking a long time to settle down.
    
    
• Monday, 12/13: Watching Geminid Meteor Shower
  
  • Mary washed coats, including blaze orange hunting gear. She also did some cross stitch work, and evening chores. 
  • I cleaned labels off 6 wine bottles, 3 of which were big 1.5-liter bottles. I rotated 8 more bottles into a bucket of baking soda/water solution.
  • After driving the 8N Ford tractor and trailer to the SW corner of the north field, I chainsawed up a red oak tree that fell over the corner post of the fence around that field. That gave me just over a half a wagon load of firewood, so I cut down another small dead red oak (base was about 7-8" in diameter), and filled the rest of the wagon. I unloaded small firewood pieces into the woodshed. The remaining larger firewood chunks, about a third of a wagon load, I'll split tomorrow.
    
  • Mary fixed baked chicken, corn on the cob, and potatoes covered with turkey gravy she froze and reheated from our Thanksgiving dinner.
  • After the nighttime dog walk, when deer stomped off while snorting at us, we stood in the lawn to watch the sky during the height of the Geminid Meteor Shower. We were out there for an hour and saw several bright streaks in the night sky. To the east of us were 2 barred owls who were really talking. They were almost making a cat purring sound. Mary says now is the height of their mating season. We also heard a coyote howling session.
    
    
• Tuesday, 12/14: High Temperatures, Hoofing Out Firewood, & Trumpeter Swans
  
  • "It's beginning to feel a lot like Easter," is my new song. Local news sources are predicting that we will break a record high tomorrow, which is 70° in Quincy, IL, set in 1948.
    
  • I sharpened the mower blade and Mary mowed the lane.
  • After unloading large firewood logs out of the trailer, I drove the tractor/trailer to where I was yesterday and cut another load of firewood from small dead hickory trees, parts of a downed red oak and a dead white oak that I dropped. I found a large turkey feather and stuck it in my hardhat. I hauled the entire wagon load, an armload at a time, up a hill in the forest and dumped the wood over the fence, then loaded the firewood in the wagon. It's the best exercise plan on earth. When I drove home, darkness was falling. Mary told me we weren't getting rain until tomorrow night, so instead of unloading firewood, I just parked the tractor/trailer in the machine shed.
    
  • Mary made a week's supply of popcorn, then did the evening chores. 
  • While doing chores, she heard trumpeter swans in the neighbor's field east of us. Then, they lifted off and 15 trumpeter swans flew over our lane. Mary was walking dogs at that moment and Plato and Amber thought loud, flying swans were very interesting.
  • We watched the 2006 movie, The Holiday.
  • Katie texted me asking for our dog's height and length measurements. She's guessing that her dogs are the same size and needs the numbers to fly them from New Orleans, LA to Anchorage, AK, which she plans to do on Jan. 16th.
    
    
• Wednesday, 12/15: Crazy Winds
  • A southwest wind blew hard all day, but after dark, gusts shook our house enough that floor boards in the kitchen were vibrating. Ventusky, a weather app we use, indicated gusts to 63 mph. We checked the roof prior to going to bed and one shingle in the tan-colored area is hanging loose, attached by only one end. That's a result of putting on shingles in cooler weather. The tar under the tips of the shingles doesn't get a chance to melt and stick in summer heat, resulting in the chance of high winds to flip them up. I'll have to try to use ladders to get to that shingle and repair it. Thankfully, it's lower on the roof and not on top.
  • On our last dog walk, we smelled a strong whiff of grass smoke on the wind. It made us stay up into the early morning hours, concerned a out-of-control grass fire was close. I walked down to the gravel road, but couldn't see anything to the west, which was the direction of the wind by 1 a.m. As I walked back to the house, I sensed a wind change to the NW and the smoke subsided. This morning, we read online that fires in Kansas were making Kansas City residents call 911 to complain about smelling smoke. Maybe that was the smoke we were smelling.
  • Quincy set a new high temperature record of 75. We were lower, at 71. Flies loved the heat and swarmed all inside windows. Mary vacuumed flies twice, today.
  • Mary also cross stitched and made a shopping list. Since we were up very late, we decided we'll go shopping on Friday.
  • I cleaned labels off 11 wine bottles and added more bottles to the baking soda water soup in 2 buckets. I also balanced the checkbook.
  • Katie texted that she purchased airline-approved crates for her pets and her 2 dogs and 2 cats are officially confirmed on a flight to Anchorage, mid-January.
  • Bill is game for helping me bottle pear wine Christmas Eve, as long as it doesn't hinder the traditional Christmas Eve smorgasbord that we do. Mary texted him that he has his priorities straight.
  • Opossums must roam on high-wind nights. I almost stumbled on one that was just in front of the porch steps after dark. We saw one while walking the dogs midway down the lane and Mary and I saw a big, roly-poly one when we checked the chicken coop for wind damage. The coop was fine.
  • We saw a juvenile bald eagle zip over the house around noon.
    
    
• Thursday, 12/16: Haircut, Firewood & Bottles
  
  • Mary received a haircut from her favorite hair dresser, her husband. She feels human, again.
  • She also worked on a craft project.
  • I unload firewood from the wagon into the woodshed, and put large pieces next to the splitter. I also rinsed winemaking mesh bags to clear bleach from them and hung them out on the clothesline. I took the bleach water and cleaned 2 coolers to make sure old mold was completely killed and set them in the woodshed to air out.
    
  • I cleaned labels off 7 wine bottles and put more labeled bottles into the baking soda water. Some of the wine bottles I recently purchased are from Spirit Knob Winery, located in Ursa, IL, just north of Quincy. Nobody rinsed out those bottles, so a dark line of dried sweet wine lines the inside bottom edges. I'm glad that I'm cleaning these bottles, first.
    
    
• Friday, 12/17: Shopping
  
  • We went shopping in Quincy, IL. Lots of shoppers, everywhere. Maybe 1 in 20 people wore masks. We found everything we wanted, except for tangerines for future cherry winemaking. Instead, I bought 2 bags of Clementines. A quick online lookup indicates that clementines, sometimes called "cuties," are a type of Mandarin orange, as are tangerines. So, I got what I needed! We also picked up the last 2 gifts Katie ordered for Christmas and sent to our address, but I diverted for a Quincy Walgreen's store pickup.
  • We watched 2 movies after unloading the car. They were The Seeker and The Polar Express.
  • On our last dog walk of the night, we heard a call that we couldn't identify. At first, we thought it was a coyote howling, but the sound was different. Checking online, it was either a bobcat in heat, or a fox during mating season. The sound was more like that of a bobcat.
    
    
• Saturday, 12/18: House Cleaning, Firewood & Bottles
  
  • Mary baked up 4 more New England long pie pumpkins, then froze 3 packages of pumpkin meat. She washed sheets and did a bunch of house cleaning.
  • Katie called me. The company that gets airline tickets for Worker's Comp still hasn't purchased them for her mid-January laser burn work in Seattle. She's contacted them, asking for some action and received an email back promising answers soon.
    
  • I split all of the big firewood logs that were next to the splitter, then stacked a wagon load of wood into the woodshed (see photo, below). The first stack of firewood is about halfway up the building and it goes down a little each day as about 4 armloads go into the house. I need to stack to about 6 feet, then fill up 2 more rows and there is enough wood for the rest of the winter.
    
  • I took labels off 10 wine bottles and cleaned them up, which finished up old bottles that we've saved. I'm now starting to work on bottles I recently bought. I threw away a bottle that had brown paint on the inside of it. Ten more bottles were added to the baking soda water soup in the large bucket.
  • While Mary did cross stitch and I worked on bottles, we celebrated...something...that required drinking a bottle of autumn olive wine I made in January. It tastes like cranberry raisins, which means it's really good.
    
  • Mary and I watched cedar waxwings in the maple tree above the woodshed pass a maple bud back and forth between them until one finally ate the bud. It's a trick they often perform.
  • A deer snorted at us when the dogs and I walked for the last time down the lane under a full moon. It was near Bluegill Pond and snorted for a long time as it went off to the SW of the pond.

  

  Stacked firewood of 1st row in woodshed.