Jan. 16-22, 2022

Weather | 1/16, 2°, 27° | 1/17, 21°, 33° | 1/18, 25°, 47° | 1/19, 5° in evening, 35° at 12:30 a.m. | 1/20, -6°, 10° | 1/21, -10°, 18° | 1/22, 18°, 37° |

• Sunday, 1/16: Katie & Pets Fly New Orleans to Anchorage
  
  • The first thing I did upon waking was to open the bedroom curtains. A tiny bit of fog meant ice crystals were floating in the air and glistening in the shaft of sunlight penetrating the fog. What a beautiful sight!
  • Our dogs love the snow. They both run around like kids through the white stuff.
  • Yesterday was the end of the last deer season, this being archery. Deer foot prints in the snow, along our lane, indicate the deer population is thriving on our property.
    
  • We watched cedar waxwings and bluebirds fluttering just off the edge of the grain bin roof while drinking water dripping off the icicles hanging on the roof edge. It's quite a sight. You don't realize how yellow the breast is of a cedar waxwing until you see one in front of pure white snow.
  • Mary made a chicken dinner, complete with potatoes covered with shallots and acorn squash.
  • We should change the name of the machine shed to the drying shed. Firewood I split on Dec. 22nd that was heavy with moisture is now dry after sitting in a criss-cross stack for over 3 weeks. All of the east end of that building is open, as is about a quarter of the south side (wide enough to drive a combine in out of the weather when Herman, Mary's uncle, built it in the 1980s). Winter winds are usually out of the east and south, which is perfect for drying firewood sitting in the machine shed. Hanging garlic from the rafters in the summer has a similar drying effect.
    
  • Katie texted around 5 p.m. that she and her pets were loaded and about to leave New Orleans. We learned this morning (1/17) that maneuvering through the different floors of the New Orleans airport with 4 crates, 4 pets, luggage, all while carrying DeSoto, a Catahoula Leopard Dog who is afraid of crossing hard-covered floors, was an extreme chore. Katie's plane was late getting into Seattle, but she said Alaska Airlines was extremely professional and assured her that her second plane wouldn't leave until her pets were transferred from the New Orleans to Seattle airplane. All landed in Anchorage with the only mishap being urine-soaked puppy pads in DeSoto's crate. Surprise! They're sleeping after that trip (see photo, below).
    
  • We read through the evening while I checked every so often on the Kansas City Chiefs/Pittsburgh Steelers wildcard play-off game. The Chiefs won 42-21. Good!

  

  Dora, one of Katie's cats, sleeping on top of Prancer, one
   of her dogs, after flying from New Orleans to Anchorage.
  

• Monday, 1/17: Pizza, Movie, & Wine
  
  • Mary made 2 pizzas. We ate one for our midday meal and the other in the evening.
    
  • Our monthly cellular bill increased in December, so I checked online. We're on a plan where if we stay under 3 GB of data on each phone, we are credited up to $20. Mary usually makes it and I usually don't. The plan for the router maxes out at 20 GB. We always hit the router's maximum about 2/3 to 3/4 of the way into the month. At that point, I use my phone as a hotspot to gain access to the internet. Since I already use the phone's hotspot capability, I did a chat with U.S. Cellular to see if we can cut out the router and save money. We can and we did that and updated our cellular plans to include 30 GB per month of hotspot access on each of our 2 phones. In December, we used 30.89 GB on 2 phones and a router, so we should be fine with 60 GB between the 2 cell phone plans. By eliminating the router, our monthly wireless bill drops by $35.
  • Katie got ball joints replaced on her Jeep, today.
    
  • We watched the 2018 movie, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a DVD Katie gave Mary for Christmas. We also viewed the extras. Several actors in Downton Abbey are in this movie. Tom Courtney, who plays the Guernsey postmaster in this movie also played Pasha/Strelnikoff in the 1965 movie, Dr. Zhivago. Mary and I liked it so much, we watched it twice. 
  • We split a bottle of jalapeño wine through the movie. The wine is mellower after aging since it was bottled on 11/26/21. This wine possesses a deep gold color.
  • After the movie, on a whim, I looked up vizsla cross dogs up for adoption. We don't need more pets, but it's fun to look at them.
    
    
• Tuesday, 1/18: A New Soup, Burning Old Boxes
  
  • Warm temperatures melted some of the snow we received last week. Mary finally freed the rain gauge and found that the last snow amounted to 0.62 inch of moisture.
    
  • Mary did some house cleaning. She made a new, very yummy, venison vegetable soup. It includes sliced up pieces of venison meat, Merlot wine, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne pepper, chili powder, black pepper, beef bouillon, water, tomato paste, Amish egg noodles, frozen mixed veggies, carrots, celery, and onion. It is very, very good.
    
  • I burned paper and cardboard items for 3 hours. The last time I burned was April 16 of last year, so there was quite a stack of cardboard boxes in the machine shed. At one point, while lifting off more boxes, a bedraggled bunny ran out from under those boxes, stopped behind the tractor trailer, looked back at me as if to say, "What's up, Doc?"
    
  • I called Mom and talked with her for over an hour. Since Jan. 2nd, she's been battling a bad flu bug that's going around the community. Patty, Mom's boss, who runs the Circle (MT) Senior Center, is retiring at the end of January, so the center is having a retirement party for her. Mom will continue to drive the senior van, because she likes that job. Mom's friend, Hank, is coming down from Glasgow, MT, for the Circle Chamber's annual dinner, which this year features a comedian.
  • All cell phones in Missouri were alerted about a vehicle to watch out for in Gotham City, MO. It was a mistake and was only supposed to be an inter-department test to the highway patrol. Because of the mention of "Gotham City," it became a big joke about the Joker in Batman. It even made the news on WGEM in Quincy.
    
    
• Wednesday, 1/19: Cold & Windy
  • The high for the day was just after midnight, with temperatures dropping throughout most of the day. There was only a little upturn in the early afternoon. Strong NW winds made it feel exceptionally cold.
  • On our morning dog walk, we watched 2 bald eagles zip by, heading north, into the wind.
    
  • Mary cooked the largest pumpkin we raised last year. We guess it was around 20 pounds. She had to cook it in quarters. A half section of that pumpkin wouldn't fit on a regular cookie sheet. Four full gallon bags of pumpkin meat were frozen from that one pumpkin.
  • Mary popped up 5 pots of popcorn and stored them away for future snack food.
    
  • I read a huge Medicare handbook that arrived in yesterday's mail. 
  • I reviewed our 401K and the notices that came with the change Mid-Rivers took from moving it from Wells Fargo to Principal. It's taken a recent nosedive since Jan. 1st, but we've been through that in the past. The best approach is to leave it alone.
    
  • I investigated potential doctors around the area in an effort to select a family doctor. I'll probably go with the one who visits Lewistown, who's with the Quincy Medical Group. Once Medicare kicks in for me, I want to initiate some medical checkups.
    
  • Katie texted that she was invited to an app, indicating that a year's worth of monthly rent involves $75 less per month than her current rent. She talked to the new landlord of her apartment to make sure the $75 per month rent reduction was true, and said it's genuine. She added, "Sounds like nothing is going to change, and the pets are good." Her dogs enjoy the Russian Jack trail system (see video, below).
    
  • Bill texted, "Had some more people out for COVID reasons. My headcount has gone from 12 to 2 in about a week." His boss tested positive for COVID and Bill was in contact with him. Bill is without symptoms, so he continues to work.
  Prancer & DeSoto on Russian Jack trails.
  

• Thursday, 1/20: Cold Temps & Racking Garlic Wine
  
  • Temperatures were very cold for here...subzero and single digits. We're burning up the red oak I split a few weeks ago. It burns nice and hot, like coal, but without the coal smell.
  • Two eastern bluebirds sat on a mulberry bush outside our south living room window this morning and picked emerging flies off the upstairs south window.
  • Mom called to give me a medical update.
    
  • Mary made a turkey rice meal, dusted books and rearrange them, did some sketching practice, and some cross stitching.
  • I called the Missouri State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) for Medicare help. I want to know if I qualify for state help in paying for Part D Medicare. They will call back.
  • I gave the garlic wine its third racking, getting rid of a bunch of fines. The specific gravity is 0.996, giving it a 13.6% alcohol content. After adding 11 ounces of spring water to top off the 5-gallon carboy, and adding a sanitized airlock, I set it back in the pantry for another month of aging. I ought to be bottling it on Feb. 20th.
    
  • An interesting article in the Feb./March issue of Fine Homebuilding gives details about how to construct plywood slab-on-grade flooring. I asked "Mike, the Pole Barn Guru," at Hanson Pole Buildings, about this concept. He email back that it was a good idea and it could be built into a pole-style building. You build up gravel layers, add foam insulation boards, and a plastic vapor barrier, similar to concrete slab construction, but instead of concrete, 2 layers of tongue-and-groove 3/4-inch plywood goes down. It's cheaper than using concrete, kinder on your knees, yet keeps out bugs and vermin that get into a crawl space. I like the idea.
    
    
• Friday, 1/21: Waffles, Stew, & Passwords
  
  • I made waffles for breakfast.
  • While in the kitchen, I saw the wings of a big bird in the distance to the NE, through our east kitchen window. It was a barred owl sitting on a fence post. While Mary and I were both watching it, the owl lifted off, took two wing flaps and pounced on something in the snow and grass, then returned to the top of the post. Barred owls have huge wings.
  • Mary dusted books and made venison stew and biscuits for our main meal.
  • I've been keeping passwords in an Apple Pages (their equivalent to Microsoft Word) file stored in iCloud. I investigated how safe that is. It's not safe. I found a free database called KeePass, pronounced kē-pass, not kēp-ass. I downloaded it, put all my passwords into it, then deleted the password list off iCloud. We have tons of passwords. This project took all day.
    
  • What started out as a very cold morning, at -10°, ended up warmer, at 18°. We stayed inside for most of the day.
  • When I went down our quarter-mile driveway for the mail, two great horned owls were hooting while some coyotes howled. Mary guessed the owls were a mated pair. They should already have a nest and eggs. Both owls hooted the same call, except one call was always a higher pitch than the other call.
    
    
• Saturday, 1/22: Critter-Chewed Buick
  
  • Mary dusted books in the upstairs north bedroom. She also did some crocheting on a new blanket.
    
  • I put a new serpentine belt on the Buick Park Avenue's engine. Critters chewed the old belt into 2 pieces a couple years ago. After connecting the battery, I started it. The engine ran roughly with a major miss and didn't improve as I let it run. I also noticed the brake pedal went to the floor, even though the brake fluid reservoir was full. I turned off the engine, took off the plastic engine cover and found 2 spark plug wires severed in half, along with other wiring chewed completely off. Much of the insulation on the firewall and the hood is chewed off. Inch-long hair is throughout the chewed insulation that contains brown tips. I smell squirrels. I've got a lot more work than I thought in getting the Buick back in operation. I set 4 mouse traps on the floor of the Buick, since I also saw mouse chewings inside the car. Wildlife really loves munching on the Buick. It has a long history of animal chewings. I once had part of the donut spare tire chewed off while it sat in the trunk of that car.
    
  • During evening chores, Mary watched a small falcon hovering above the field, SE of the house. It was absolutely parked in the air. Consulting bird books, she identified it as an Amercian kestrel.
  • We watched 3 episodes the 2008 HBO series, John Adams, a Christmas gift from Bill to Mary.