Dec. 18-24, 2022

Weather | 12/18, 8°, 29° | 12/19, 17°, 34° | 12/20, 21°, 23° | 12/21, 12°, 29° | 12/22, 1" snow, 0.09" moisture, -11°, 27° in early A.M. | 12/23, -12°, 1° | 12/24, 0°, 17° |

• Sunday, 12/18: Firewood Splitting
  
  • I finished covering strawberry plants in the machine shed, this time with pieces of chicken wire. Little pieces were cut to fit over top of leaf-covered bucket tops that surrounded a 4x4 post holding up the work bench. I finished by weighing it all down with bricks.
  • The wheelbarrow tire I fixed last week leaks slowly. It needs replacing. I inflated the tire to get through the day.
  • Mary and I split 6 wheelbarrow loads of firewood. Five loads were stacked in the woodshed and one went to the house. We split several pieces of honey locust, which are very hard and heavy. As we were splitting these pieces, we discovered old thorns that were buried inside the locust wood. We also have a developing pile of wet firewood that needs to be stacked in the machine shed to dry.
  • Robust fermentation of the garlic wine fills the house with such a strong garlic odor that we can now smell it outside of the house. The specific gravity was 1.091. I squeezed the nylon mesh bag and stirred the brew bucket prior to taking a reading. The brew bucket was behind the woodstove again today.
  • We watched the 1989 movie, When Harry Met Sally.
    
    
• Monday, 12/19: Building Up the Firewood Stack
  
  • Mary and I split more firewood. A pile of wet wood continues to grow. We stacked five wheelbarrow loads into the woodshed. We're nearing the top of our second ring of firewood. Mary put one wheelbarrow load into the house. The honey locust wood is hard to start, but once it's burning, locust firewood gives off wonderful heat.
    
  • Mary made dark chocolate peanut clusters...YUM!
    
  • Mary saw six mallards heading west. We both watched a big flock of Canada geese fly south. They looked like they were seeking a place to settle in for the night. The east side of their V started to head down, stalling the entire V into a bunched up flight pattern as some geese hollered for others to get back in line.
    
  • I kept the garlic wine in the pantry. Fermentation is bubbling along very nicely. The specific gravity is 1.067.
    
  • I washed 5 wine bottles.
  • Our weather prediction by the U.S. Weather Service is for 3-5 inches of snow, wind gusts to 50 mph and temperatures down to -8 on Friday. Bill shows up on Saturday. I'm hoping snow accumulation and wind is lower than predicted, or driving on the gravel road might be difficult.
  • We are receiving daily small eggs from our four Barred Rock pullets. One of our eldest hens, our only remaining Golden Comet, I've named Luna Tick, or Ms. Tick. She's kind of a mental case. I always have to round her up and herd her into the coop every evening while Mary is feeding chickens inside the coop.
    
    
• Tuesday, 12/20: More Firewood Duties
  
  • Mary and I split more firewood. Most of it was wet. One wheelbarrow load of dry wood went into the woodshed and Mary took one to the house. I built 2 criss-cross stacks of nearly dry wood and one really wet stack on the north inside wall of the machine shed, as Mary moved wheelbarrow loads to me. Darkness fell before we could finish.
  • Mary made more dark chocolate peanut clusters. Testing a couple was in order.
  • This morning, the garlic wine smell in the pantry resembled bad body odor. By evening, yeast took over and the aroma was similar to fruit. The moral of the story, if you've got bad B.O. in the morning, wait until evening and you'll smell like fruit. Or...add yeast to your stinky armpits and they'll smell like fruit by evening.
  • The garlic wine's fermentation is robust (see video, below). The specific gravity is 1.044. I'll probably need to rack it tomorrow.
  • I cleaned 5 more wine bottles. I now have enough cleaned bottles for Thursday, when I rack and bottle 3 wine varieties.
  • I'm heading for Quincy, IL in the morning to mainly pickup 2 more bags of hen feed. We don't want to run out if road conditions get bad.
  • Predictions are for airline flight cancellations and delays across the country with a large winter storm approaching tomorrow and Friday. I texted to Katie that I was glad she wasn't trying to visit us this year because of the weather. She replied that she thought the same thing, today.
  Yeast in garlic wine with robust fermentation.
  

• Wednesday, 12/21: Cookies, Shopping, & Firewood
  
  • Mary baked a triple batch of oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies.
  • She then put extra hay in the chicken coop, due to below zero temperatures predicted in the next few days.
    
  • Mary sorted piles of split firewood and moved them to new piles...2 in front of criss-cross stacks and one of damp and wet short pieces.
  • Meanwhile, I drove the pickup to Quincy to buy chicken food and some human food. It seemed as if nobody was at home or at work. Instead, the entire population of Quincy was at a store. I've never seen so many people out and about in Quincy. I only had 6 stops, but it took me 5 hours.
  • Probably all of the news pieces headlining an approaching bomb cyclone has everyone scurrying around like frightened rats, stuffing grocery stores with people pushing carts. I sound like an old fart, but 50 years ago our winter weather predictions were simply about upcoming snow. Heck, in Alaska, we drove to work and school in this stuff. On the way home, I noticed patterns of moisture on the pavement. It was from salt tossed on the road a good 18 hours prior to any snowfall. Now, that's just wasteful and dumb!
    
  • After returning home, I stacked firewood that Mary sorted. Now, all split firewood is put away. There is more to split, but it's an amount that we can easily do in one day.
  • Right at sundown, a big flock a Canada geese flew west over our property. A few minutes later, a flock of snow geese flew west.
    
  • I racked the garlic wine into a 5-gallon carboy, a 750-ml wine bottle, and halfway up a 330-ml beer bottle. The specific gravity is 1.028. Strong fermentation continued after racking, with the airlock on the carboy burping twice a second. Fortunately, garlic wine foams less than blackberry wine.
    
    
• Thursday, 12/22: Bottling Jalapeño Wine
  
  • The outside temperature was 6° with a skiff of snow on the ground when we woke. It started snowing harder soon thereafter. We only received about an inch of snow, but we experienced west, northwest wind gusts to 40 mph through the day and overnight. It was -11° when we went to bed.
    
  • Katie called and said a UPS package she was tracking was delivered to our front door. It wasn't there, so I put on winter gear and walked to the end of the lane. I saw dual tire tracks going to the neighbor's mobile home across the gravel road, so I checked with them. Juan opened the door, saw me, and said, "I have a package for you that they delivered." He was on lunch break from the dairy and saw the package on his front porch.
  • Amazon really stinks. We ordered 4 items from them on Nov. 27. I got an email today that one of those items has shipped.
  • I racked and bottled the jalapeño wine. It went into 33 bottles (see photo, below). One was a 375-ml bottle. The specific gravity is 0.991, making for a 12% alcohol content. Sanitizing 33 bottles took the most time, although filling 33 bottles also ate up time. I wanted to bottle apple wine and cider, but didn't have time for that. We tasted the jalapeño wine. It was warm, without being excruciatingly hot. It's perfect for a cold winter's night. Chocolate peanut clusters complement the wine, nicely.
  • Mary did a bit of cleaning, kept the chickens in warm water with water changes every 2 hours, did most of the chores, and some crocheting.
  • We received texts from Katie and Bill throughout the day. Bill went to work early, at 7:30, so he left work early. He said conditions weren't too bad in St. Louis, but that the wind was brutal. He learned from delivery drivers that a lot of businesses were closed. Katie said she wound up as the only employee in the office by mid-afternoon. She won a Holiday Pup photo entry at Skinny Raven Sports in Anchorage (see photo, below) with a picture of her dog, Prancer. She received a gift card from Skinny Raven.
    
    

33 bottles of freshly corked jalapeño wine.

Katie won a holiday photo contest
with this shot of her puppy, Prancer.

• Friday, 12/23: Damn Cold Day
  • I woke right after 5 a.m. and restarted the fire in the woodstove, then crawled back in bed. Later, when we got up, the living room was nice and toasty. All pets huddled around the stove at all hours, soaking in the good heat.
    
  • Outside temperatures were below zero for most of the day. West, northwest wind gusts blew harder today.
  • I bundled up and looking like an astronaut on the moon, I walked the quarter mile trek to the mailbox. Big deer tracks in the snow indicated deer crossed the lane in 4 places. There was even a well worn path of mice tracks in the snow.
    
  • Mary and I both did some housecleaning.
  • Mary made cherry and black raspberry bars.
  • She also took water out to the chickens once an hour. In one hour, water was half-frozen in the waterers. Chickens weren't moving much from one hour to the next.
  • We wrapped Christmas presents in the evening.
    
  • Katie sent her mother several photos of Katie's decorated Christmas tree.
  • We watched 2 Christmastime movies. They were Love Actually and The Polar Express.
    
    
• Saturday, 12/24: Christmas Eve
  
  • Mom texted that it snowed and blew for a big winter blast in the past few days. It was -27 in Circle, MT, yesterday. Drifts are up to 4 feet deep in her yard. Temperatures rose to above zero for the first time all week, this morning.
  • Bill showed up around 11:30 A.M.
  • I drilled holes in 4 new plastic bottles and put mothballs in them to give to Bill as new mouse-deterrents in his car's engine compartment.
    
  • Mary baked a pistachio tort, Bill's favorite treat.
    
  • Mary cut up cheese and summer sausage, along with several types of veggies and made Ranch dip for our smorgasbord.
  • We ate while playing Night Sky Monopoly. Bill won and broke the bank with the only monopoly on the board, involving the light blue properties. He ended the game with over $14,000. Mary was second and I was third. It was fun.
    
  • We watched A Christmas Carol, starring Patrick Stewart.