Jan. 1-7, 2023

Weather | 1/1, 35°, 51° | 1/2, 37°, 46° | 1/3, 1" rain, 45°, 61° | 1/4, 29°, 35° | 1/5, 28°, 34° | 1/6, 19°, 39° | 1/7, 16°, 29° |

• Sunday, 1/1: New Year's Day
  
  • We're getting more eggs from our hens so that today Mary made two quiche pies. We ate one and we'll have the other one tomorrow.
    
  • I updated the checkbook.
    
  • Mary received a fly bite yesterday, so out came the fly swatter. There are more invasive flies than Asian ladybugs at this time of the year and this year.
    
  • We watched more swans fly by in the evening. Today, they flew to the west either south or north of our house.
  • We read into in the evening. Mary is reading The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, The Remarkable Education of John Quincy Adams, and the latest issue of The English Home magazine. I'm reading One Man's Wilderness, Farm and Workshop Welding, Princes at War, and the January issue of Astronomy magazine featuring comets.
    
    
• Monday, 1/2: Fog & Racking Garlic Wine
  
  • We woke to thick fog, which persisted throughout the day. Around 9 p.m., a thunderstorm rolled through and with rain and thunder, the fog cleared. I'm sure not used to winter thunderstorms.
  • Mary dusted books in the upstairs north bedroom.
    
  • The last time Bill was here, he accidentally chipped a piece off the top of the plastic cylinder I use to measure a wine's specific gravity after placing wine in the cylinder and dropping in a hydrometer. Today I cut the jagged top off with a hacksaw, then sanded the edge smooth with 150-grit sandpaper. It's shorter, requiring less liquid to fill it. I sent Bill a picture of it after fixing the cylinder with this message: "Thanks...you helped make this shorter, so it's better, now!"
  • I racked the garlic wine for the second time. It's specific gravity is 0.994 and the pH is 3.0. There was about an inch of fines left behind in the carboy. I added 0.9 of a gram of potassium metabisulfide, then moved the must to a 5-gallon carboy. I added about 2 ounces of distilled water to top it up. For the first time, I used an S-shaped airlock that I got from Bill for Christmas.
  • Mary "went shopping" in her supply of cross stitch floss for 6 future projects. The good news is when she buys floss that she's missing, she still has a bunch of money left in the gift card that Katie gave her for Christmas.
  • Katie sent a photo (see below) of one of her cats gazing out the window.

  

  A view from Katie's apartment in Anchorage.

• Tuesday, 1/3: Bottling Apple Cider & Apple Wine
  
  • An inch of rain fell overnight. Morning fog lifted to a mostly sunny day.
  • While walking the dogs this morning, a deer snorted at us from east of the lane.
    
  • Mary washed a load of towels.
  • I bottled apple cider and apple wine.
  • I moved two one-gallon jugs of cider into a brew bucket and added 0.4 grams of Kmeta. The specific gravity is 1.003 for an alcohol content of 4.85%. The pH is 3.0, or very acidic. I corked ten bottles. The taste if very sour with a good apple flavor. Mary says it's like lemonade, but with apples. We think it will be ideal served with ice on a hot summer day.
  • I then moved two one-gallon jugs and a half-gallon jug of apple wine into a brew bucket and added 0.5 grams of Kmeta. The specific gravity is 0.996, resulting in 11.92% alcohol. The pH is 3.4, or just about perfect. I corked 12 bottles. I tried to fill a 375-ml bottle, but ran out of wine, so we drank the last bit (see photos, below). It tasted great. Mary says it's very smooth with a good apple taste. She said if I forgot apple cider altogether and just make apple wine, it will be just fine.
  • Mary enjoyed some cross stitching and finished dusting books upstairs.
  • We listened to more of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Before Hitler took power, there were several conniving German politicians who were trying to become dictators. What a mess the German government was in the early 1930s.

Apple wine endings didn't fill a 375-ml bottle...

So, we drank it. This apple wine is very good.

• Wednesday, 1/4: Saving Money
  
  • Mary got up at midnight and some deer snorted when the bed creaked and they heard it through our open bedroom window. They apparently were in our east yard, just a few feet from the house. We are just caretakers around here. Wildlings are the real property owners.
    
  • Mary made a monthly food menu and a shopping list.
  • She also paid monthly bills and figured where to designate savings for this year.
  • Mary fixed a big pot of minestrone soup that will give us several meals. It's good.
    
  • I saved us $50 in January's water bill. The rural water district has estimated our usage since June or July. They don't read the meter. We use a lot of water in summer while watering gardens, so they have us using 7,000 gallons a month, since the last time they read the meter was in the summer. I checked the meter when we got the bill on 12/31 and we are more than 8,000 gallons under their estimate. I called them today and relayed the information. The woman I talked to changed our bill and is charging us a minimum payment of $24, instead of $76. I'm going to continue to read the meter, since they're too lazy to read it and overcharge us for monthly water usage.
  • I made an online request for a doctor's appointment. I feel it's time to get a general practice doctor.
  • I cleaned up wine items. The apple wine left a solid residue on the inside of glass jugs that required scrubbing to remove it. I suspect it was pectin from the apple fruit. I then sorted and put away winemaking items in the west room closet. A wide assortment of clean carboys, brew buckets, and bottles filled the west room's floor for several months due to my laziness. Mary complained that opening the cabinet door that holds her cross stitch items was difficult. With all winemaking material in the closet, we can now do a dance in that room.
    
  • We watched the 5th episode of the PBS Ken Burns documentary, The Roosevelts, which involved 1939 to 1944. An interesting name was adopted by a Republican U.S. Senate group opposing U.S. entry into WW II. It was called America First. Trump used the same phrase in support of his trade sanctions.
    
    
• Thursday, 1/5: Shopping Day
  
  • We drove to Quincy, IL, and shopped. On the drive, we saw several American Kestrels and a rough-legged hawk.
  • The first stop was at the Quincy Public Library, where I used their WiFi to download the latest software on our iPhones while Mary 5 bought books and 2 DVDs. The update on my phone didn't finish because of too much storage space taken up with photos. Late in the evening, I deleted photos and videos. The number of winemaking photos was unreal, so today I apologize for putting everyone through so many wine pictures on this site. I'll endeavor to cut down on such silliness.
  • Food prices continue to rocket to the moon. We saw eggs at Aldi for $4.44 a dozen. That's at an inexpensive grocer and it equals 37 cents an egg. We are happy that we have our own homegrown egg supply.
  • I picked up another used cooler for wine storage at the Salvation Army.
  • We watched 3 episodes of Downton Abbey.
    
    
• Friday, 1/6: Housecleaning & Wine Storage
  
  • Mary swept and mopped the floors, then dusted the house. She also did a load of sheets.
  • I labeled apple wine and apple cider and stored all of the full bottles in a cooler. I now have 11 coolers full of wine. And yet, I have more wine to make...ha, ha, ha. Bill sent his mother the following text, "Tell Dad his wine photos aren't silly."
    
  • We watched the last episode of Ken Burns' The Roosevelts, plus all of the extras. It's a very good PBS series. In one of the extras is a piece on Ken Burns presenting excerpts of this documentary at a Roosevelt family reunion in Warm Springs, GA. It's amazing how similar several present-day Roosevelt descendants resemble Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor.
  • We enjoyed a bottle of pumpkin wine. It's really good, especially in the winter.
  • While walking dogs for their last outing, the full moon gave off so much light that a flashlight wasn't required.
    
    
• Saturday, 1/7: Fresh Bread & Moving Firewood
  
  • Two red-tailed hawks sat on oak branches along the north edge of the west field as we walked to the chicken coop to let the chickens out this morning. Because we can't have big hawks swooping down on our chickens, I walked down the west field until they flew off.
  • Mary baked 4 loaves of bread. We enjoyed 3 slices, each, of fresh bread with our fried eggs and turkey bacon evening meal. Partially frozen muskmelon was served for dessert.
    
  • I split the remaining firewood logs next to the splitter. Then, I moved 10 wheelbarrow loads of firewood that dried along the inside north wall of the machine shed and stacked it in the woodshed. I finished after dark, with the aid of a hat light.
  • Before sunset, we saw several Vs of trumpeter swans fly overhead. The first group of five swans startled us as we walked away from the coop, after putting chickens to bed for the night. Mary and I were talking to one another when suddenly, right overhead, there were several trumpeter swan sounds of "Honk, honk, honk!" We didn't know they were above us until we heard them. They were just above the tree tops.
    
  • We watched four episodes of Downton Abbey.