Dec. 11-17, 2022

Weather | 12/11, 30°, 36° | 12/12, 29°, 37° | 12/13, 1.08" rain, 32°, 48° | 12/14, 0.14" rain, 43°, 46° | 12/15, snow flurries, 29°, 31° | 12/16, 23°, 29° | 12/17, 16°, 24° |

• Sunday, 12/11: Wheelbarrow Repair
  
  • I fixed a wheelbarrow tire. It's a new tire and rim that I left in the woodshed for years. Sun shined on one side, eventually rotting the rubber valve stem. I cut the old stem off. After putting dish soap on a new stem, I used the cap off the cut-off stem as a sacrificial instrument, grabbed it with a stout pair of pliers and pulled the new rubber valve stem into place in the rim. The tire wouldn't inflate, due to leaks between the tire and the rim, so I used a 1" wide nylon strap from a long-dead boat tarp and tightened it around the outside of the tire's tread so the tire's sidewalls expanded outward, then successfully inflated the tire. Now we're back to 2 good wheelbarrows.
    
  • Mary fixed a marvelous midday dinner of baked home-raised chicken, homegrown sweet potatoes and a green bean casserole. The green beans grew in our garden. It's a cheap meal.
    
  • We watched 2 movies. The first was the 2018 movie, Green Book. The second was the 2006 movie, Miss Potter.
    
  • Partway through the second movie, Katie called. We talked to her for about an hour. She arrived back in Anchorage early this morning and slept most of today. Another big dump of snow hit Anchorage today. Katie's surgery to ease itching from her burn scheduled for this Friday in Seattle may have to be canceled due to the lack of having a person to help watch over her for 24 hours after the surgery.
    
    
• Monday, 12/12: Blaze Orange is Retired
  
  • Last night at sundown was the end of the anterless firearms deer season. It means we can walk outside without wearing blaze orange vests and hats in case some trespassing hunter is nearby. YAHOO!!!
  • Mary and I took the tractor/wagon to the north side of the woods just north of the house, cut firewood, and drove a filled wagon back home. We unloaded most of it in the machine shed next to the splitter. We now have four loads of firewood waiting to be split into usable pieces. Small, dry firewood went into two wheelbarrows, which we transferred into the house.
  • I asked Katie in a text if she stayed home from work today, since Anchorage is getting another big dump of snow. She texted back that UIC, her employer, had everyone work remotely from home, today. She added that main roads are alright, but side streets and parking lots are terrible.
  • In the evening, Katie texted her mother that one of her running friends volunteered to travel with her to Seattle, so Katie can do her surgery.
    
    
• Tuesday, 12/13: Full Day of Rain
  
  • Rain fell against the east window upon our waking and rain fell all day, even after it grew dark.
  • Mary worked on a cross stitch ornament.
  • I racked the Kieffer pear wine for the 3rd time. It still has specific gravity of 1.000. There was only a tiny bit of fines. It will probably be ready to bottle in a month. We tasted it. This pear wine is the smoothest. Mary says it has a tangy flavor, when compared to Bartlett pear wine. We even drank all of the dregs, because the leftover wine with fines in it tasted great, too. The remaining must filled a gallon jug, a half-gallon jug, and a 750-ml wine bottle. I topped up the wine bottle with a couple ounces of distilled water.
  • While working on the wine and while Mary cross stitched, we listened to an audiobook of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, because nothing says Christmas more than a book about Nazis! Actually, it's very interesting.
  • We enjoyed a bottle of 2021 autumn olive wine. It tastes good, but an entire bottle split between two people is a bit much on the tipsy level.
    
  • Katie texted, "Driving in Anchorage right now is kind of like those 'Choose Your Own Adventure' books. It's like Whose Line Is It Anyway?...the roads are made up and the lines don't matter."
  • I asked Katie when she will be going to Seattle. She answered that she should be flying there on Thursday and flying back Saturday, but she's still waiting on airline tickets and hotel room bookings, due to resent changes.

  

  Katie & her dog, Prancer,
  at a holiday party a couple weekends ago.

• Wednesday, 12/14: Garlic Winemaking
  
  • We had another cloudy day. The sky has been gray for several days.
  • Mary did 2 loads of laundry.
  • She cross stitched in the kitchen, listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Riech while I worked on winemaking.
  • I started a 5-gallon batch of garlic wine. I popped Music Pink, German Extra Hardy, and Samarkand garlic varieties to get 465 cloves. I peeled skins off the cloves. After about an hour, Mary looked at my slow progress, looked at the clock, grabbed a knife and started helping while saying, "I don't want to be up until 4 in the morning." She peeled 3 garlic cloves to my one. Mary attributes it to years of practice. Five cloves were bad. I ran 460 garlic cloves through the food processor and put them into a nylon mesh bag. I added three 96-ounce bottles of white grape juice for a total of 2.25 gallons. This juice contains potassium metabisulfite (Kmeta). All experts say not to use juice containing this, since it kills off yeast. But this warning makes no sense, since every batch of wine starts with a 24-hour soak of Kmeta to kill wild yeast. Since all I could find was juice containing Kmeta, I decided to give it a try. I added 2.25 gallons of tap water treated with Kmeta to remove chlorine. I stirred in 8 pounds of sugar, resulting in a specific gravity of 1.104. This juice contains a higher sugar content than last year's juice. I added a quart of water to drop the specific gravity to 1.100. The pH is 3.5, so I didn't add acid blend. Since my total Kmeta additions to tap water equaled 1 gram, the amount needed to add to 5 gallons of must, I didn't add more. I let it sit overnight in a brew bucket covered with a towel.
  • The garlic smell makes the entire house smell like a pizza joint. We decided to make pizza tomorrow.
    
    
• Thursday, 12/15: Alaska & Montana Snow Battles
  
  • We had small snow flurries throughout the day. Actually, it was more like tiny ice balls. Nothing ever accumulated.
  • Such was not the case elsewhere. Katie sent a photo (see below) of Northern Lights Blvd. in Anchorage. It's normally a multi-lane street, but 3 big snowstorms in a row dumping a total 41.1" in December resulted in snowplow berms restricting the street to one-lane traffic.
  • Mom texted the following, "There's been a blizzard going all day today. I have a drift in my driveway that is waist high. I parked my car in the street out front before this started. It must be pretty bad out in the country. I saw a big jackrabbit hopping down the street in front of a pickup."
  • After adding 2.5 teaspoons of pectic enzyme and 5 teaspoons of yeast nutrient to the garlic wine, I worked up a starter of Lalvin EC-1118 yeast. I added heated must to it all day and pitched the yeast into the brew bucket in the late evening. The pH was 3.8, so I added 2 teaspoons of acid blend to get a pH of 3.5. Last year, I had to add 5 teaspoons of acid blend, so this year's white grape juice contains more acidic acid. The specific gravity was still 1.100. The garlic smell is very strong throughout our house.
  • Mary made 2 pizzas and cooked one for our midday meal.
  • I moved all 35 four-gallon buckets and 4 tubs containing strawberry plants and soil into the machine shed under the wooden work bench. Each plant got trimmed. They still need mulch and something to cover them so rabbits and mice don't eat strawberry crowns.
  • Katie and her friend flew from Anchorage to Seattle. Her plane was delayed in arriving into Anchorage, but she made it to a Seattle hotel and ordered some food. Her procedure is scheduled for 11:45, tomorrow.
  • We watched the 1989 movie, Christmas Vacation.

  

  Anchorage's Northern Lights Boulevard.

• Friday, 12/16: Katie's Procedure is Complete
  
  • Katie went through the procedure at the Harborview Burn Center in Seattle to relieve the itching on scar tissue from the burn she had 2 years ago. Katie tried to get this done in January, but elevated COVID numbers required the burn center to cancel her appointment at the last minute. She and her friend accompanying her leave on a flight back to Anchorage at noon tomorrow.
    
  • Mom texted 2 photos (see below) of snow drifts at her home due to a blizzard that's hit eastern Montana for the past few days.
    
  • After adding yeast to the garlic wine must last night, there is no fermentation today. The Kmeta levels are too high, I suspect. I added 2.5 teaspoons of yeast energizer, which is used to fix stuck fermentation. It contains diammonium phosphate, yeast hulls, magnesium sulphate, and vitamin B complex. I also moved the brew bucket to behind the woodstove to heat up the liquid. By bedtime, there was a minuscule layer of foam on top with the tiniest of bubbles appearing on the surface.
    
  • While Mary did the evening chores, I raked up four wheelbarrow loads of dried oak leaves and put then on the strawberry plants in the machine shed.
    
  • Mary finished an cross stitch ornament.
  • We listened to the end of the first section of the audio book, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
    
  • I dug out all of the wine bottles in the west room closet, sorted them, labeled boxes of bottles, counted clean bottles, determined the number needed for upcoming wines due to be bottled and decided that I need to clean 15 more bottles. Apple wine, apple cider, and jalapeño wine are all due for bottling on Thursday, 12/22.

Mom's back yard. A driveway is under there.

Snow on south side of Mom's house.

• Saturday, 12/17: Mallards Leave as Ponds Freeze
  
  • We saw several Vs of mallard ducks flying west to east above the house as we walked the dogs in the morning. I'm guessing there were more than a hundred...quite impressive. We think they're heading to the Mississippi River, where there's still open water.
    
  • The garlic wine brew bucket sat behind the woodstove for a second day. I put it away in the pantry each night. An additional tiny bit of bubbles appeared on the top in the morning. By 10:30 p.m., considerably more foam showed and we heard fizzing. The specific gravity dropped 1 thousandth from 1.100 to 1.099, proving yeast started to burn off sugar.
  • I walked the dogs to the east woods, collected 2 buckets that I used to sit on in my deer blinds, and took the dogs and buckets home. Lots of deer tracks show on all trails. A bald eagle flew across Wood Duck Pond as the puppies and I stood on its south shore. Most water was filled with ice on all ponds. A stiff west wind stung my face as we walked home. Amber, who sports short hair, beat us all home. She was eager to lay next to the warm woodstove.
    
  • Katie sent me a text asking me if I was following the Minnesota Vikings/Indianapolis Colts game. Then Bill sent images of the Vikings game scoring with a "this is bananas" text. With Bill's help on where to find an online link, I listened to the last moments of the game. Down 33-0 at halftime and 36-7 after three quarters, Minnesota scored the biggest comeback in NFL history on a field goal in overtime to win 39-36.
  • Katie was watching the game at the Seattle airport, because her plane arrived late. Then Delta had pilot issues, delaying the flight even further. She finally left Seattle around 7 p.m., on a flight that was originally scheduled to leave around noon. Fog painted thick frost on trees and snow berms still filled Anchorage streets when Katie arrived back home (see photos, below).
  • I added a 3'x5' piece of quarter-inch hardware cloth on top of some of the strawberry buckets in the machine shed. After digging bricks out of leaves from behind the machine shed, I used them to weigh down the wire hardware cloth.
  • I washed 5 wine bottles before going to bed.

Anchorage street with frosty trees.

A snow-covered car in Anchorage.