Jan. 8-14, 2023

Weather | 1/8, skiff of snow, 0.01" moisture, 24°, 28° | 1/9, 21°, 49° | 1/10, 26°, 47° | 1/11, 31°, 51° | 1/12, 25°, 33° | 1/13, 19°, 29° | 1/14, 11°, 39° |

• Sunday, 1/8: Deer Aplenty
  
  • A skiff of snow fell overnight. It melted quickly.
  • When we walked the dogs in the morning, we had deer snorting at us from the woods on the opposite side of Bluegill Pond.
  • Bill texted that he felt ill since Saturday morning, with a sore throat and body aches, but without a fever. He said he feels a little better today.
    
  • Mary dusted books in the sunroom.
  • I washed up the newest cooler recently purchased and let it dry in the upstairs north bedroom. Mary says we soon won't have space for a bed in that room, due to all of the damn wine!
    
  • I took the dogs on a long walk into the east woods, since it was a nice sunny day. Near the old cow barn, I noticed deer running north to south to get away from us. We saw many deer tracks in the sand at the edge of Wood Duck Pond. Further up the dry creek bed, there were raccoon tracks. The dogs loved the outing.
    
  • With online research on how to build an apple scratter (the device that pulverizes apples into mush prior to squeezing out the juice), I decided to buy a used food processor, instead. I want to get away from the hand grinder, which is really built for grinding meat to make burger and sausages, not apple mush. That grinder gives everything a slightly metallic taste.
    
  • Mary and I ordered garden seeds from Fedco. The bill was $94. Seeds are more expensive, but not as spendy as buying the finished product from the grocery store.
    
    
• Monday, 1/9: Garlic Sprouts & Indoor Carpentry Ideas
  
  • Mary made flour tortillas.
  • She also made a quick check of the garlic and found 3 varieties sprouting, which is no surprise with recent warm temperatures. A return to cold temperatures won't hurt them. They will just have brown tips after they grow in the spring.
  • Mom texted that she is also working up a garden seed buying list and that seed prices are significantly higher. She has deer tracks all over her yard, with some even on her back porch.
    
  • I dug deep into two internet rabbit holes. One involved flooring alternatives. The commercial vinyl tile floor that Mary's Uncle Herman installed in this house is chipping apart. Under it in the living room, the bathroom, and the west room is old-fashion particle board, which is disintegrating, leaving nails sticking out of the plank floor under it. Plywood, which is better, is under the breaking-up kitchen vinyl squares. Our floor is a mess. When we arrived here in 2009, I painted a piece of orientated strand board (OSB) with gray porch and floor paint and put it on the pantry floor. It looks great after close to 14 years. Online searches show that an OSB floor works fine when painted with a quality primer, followed by several coats of porch and floor paint. It might be an inexpensive way to improve our floors until we can afford to put up a new and better home.
  • The other internet search that I did involved building a new, yet inexpensive, kitchen countertop. Herman built our current countertop using half-inch plywood covered with cheap laminate. The plywood is too thin. Kneading bread on it makes it bend. Plus, some of the laminate is worn through the fake marble pattern. Two sheets of 3/4-inch plywood is recommended for a countertop. Placing maple plywood on top, adding poplar trim, staining the wood, then covering it with four coats of polyurethane produces a waterproof surface that's inexpensive and looks admirable. Again, it might be a good improvement that gets us by for a few years.
    
  • We watched the first half of Ken Burns' PBS documentary The Dust Bowl. This was a Christmas present to Mary from Bill. It's very interesting.
    
  • I washed 4 wine bottles, because tomorrow I'll rack and bottle the Kieffer pear wine.
  • A package of 20 Antonovka apple seeds came in today's mail. Plans are to grow them into apple rootstocks for future apple grafting projects.
    
    
• Tuesday, 1/10: Hunting a Non-Existent Calf
  
  • The neighbor bordering our east property line, visited us, asking about a lost calf. All of his yearling calves broke out through a fence after a bunch of dogs went through. He thinks the dogs might be from someone hunting raccoons or coyotes. He returned 12 calves, but cannot find the last calf and asked if we saw it...a black calf with white markings, which could be half of all cattle in this county. I told him we haven't seen anything, but I'd take a look around our property.
    
  • Mary and I took a hike north, then east. We looked for calf tracks, but didn't see any. We did find a large snapping turtle shell on the west shore of Wood Duck Pond. There were lots deer and raccoon tracks. 
  • The neighbor north of our land has a small, white metal, fully-enclosed trailer parked just 50 feet from the fence dividing our properties. It sits on top of a hill and has sliding plexiglass windows, probably used as a hunting shack. We never heard gun shots from that area during hunting season. One reason might be the fact that it's glaring white and not concealed at all.
    
  • I racked the Kieffer pear wine for the fourth time and bottle it. The specific gravity was still 1.000, giving it a 10.22 alcohol content. The pH is 3.4, little change from 3.3 when I made this batch on Nov. 1st. There were minimal fines. I bottled and corked nine bottles. Eight were 750-ml bottles and one was a 375-ml bottle. Mary and I tasted the wine. It tasted very strongly of pear, like drinking pear cider. We think our timing was perfect on processing these pears. Often we get too late with Bartlett pears and the fruit is rather overripe when I make the wine. These Kieffer pears were ready, but still solid and not falling apart. It might make a difference in bringing out a strong pear flavor.
    
  • When Mary walked the dogs at night while I attended to the fire in the woodstove, she heard hounds baying just across the road. To avoid getting our dogs tangled into a group of coon hounds, she hurried north up our lane with our puppies. As they returned, she heard a shot. It was probably a coon hunter across the gravel road from us. We thought how nice that must be for Alma, the Hispanic mother of a 6-month old baby, while hounds are howling and a shot rings out nearby.
    
    
• Wednesday, 1/11: Firewood Collection
  
  • Mary and I cut, hauled home, and put away a load of firewood. We drove the tractor down the trail to Wood Duck Pond and cut up about six small downed trees where the trail first enters the east woods. We were looking for completely dry wood, which we found.
  • A hawk in the trees east of where we cut firewood didn't like us and told us so. Mary heard mallard ducks at Wood Duck Pond.
    
  • While chucking firewood pieces over a fence, I walked into the blunt edge of a small cedar branch. It left a bloody mark down the entire length of the left side of my face. I look like I fought off a bear, but it was only a bare twig.
  • After seeing so many dead cedar trees that are super hard after drying for years in nature, Mary thinks we should use them, since they're free to us, for fence posts and maybe even posts in a post and frame house. Yes, definitely for fence posts, and maybe, but above ground, for house construction.
    
  • After sunset, I heard trumpeter swans and watched for them, seeing a few fly by to the south of our house. Suddenly, an owl flew silently by just a few feet above my head.
    
  • We watched two episodes of Downton Abbey.
  • Bill texted that he was going to try to take a day off at the end of this month and visit us.
    
    
• Thursday, 1/12: Quiet, Windy Day
  
  • Northwest wind gusts to 33 mph made for a cool feeling day, outside.
  • I took our puppies on a walk to the east woods and back. It was fast, but they loved the walk.
    
  • Mary did some cross stitch.
  • I searched online about making cedar posts. Keys to successful cedar posts: debark the wood, remove white sap wood since it rots quickly and the red heartwood lasts a long time, let them dry for a year, seek trees in thick groves where they grow tall because they have thin growth rings and contain denser wood, pack pea gravel under and around post to allow for drainage and drying. Some farmers report cedar posts lasting for decades.
    
  • In the evening, I looked for design ideas involving solariums/greenhouses built into a house. All I found were monster homes involving millions of dollars. I'm not interested in that approach. I need to develop my own ideas.
    
    
• Friday, 1/13: A Lucky Day
  • I made waffles for breakfast and Mary made a General Tso venison dish for our main meal.
  • Mary also cross stitched the deer's nose in dark navy blue in a project she's working on. A photo of what the project will look like is below.
    
  • I cleaned labels off 9 wine bottles, using a new method that Mary discovered online (see photo below). After filling bottles with tap water so they stay put, they're placed in a canner filled with water, some vinegar, and a few squeezes of dish soap. They heat until the water boils, then let they sit for 20 minutes. The labels are supposed to peel right off. Some did and the rest came off easily with a fishing fillet knife. I did a little bit of scrubbing with baking soda and a green Scotch pad to remove glue. Next time, I'll get them to a rolling boil, instead of just starting to boil, then let it sit for 30-40 minutes. Still, this is the best method of removing wine bottle labels that I've done so far.
    
  • When Mary went to remove the indoor chicken waterer so it wouldn't freeze overnight, she walked up to a deer that was right behind the woodshed. Mary and the deer surprised one another. It was only 6 feet away and didn't seem to care about Mary's presence. Mary said it wouldn't leave until she started whistling.
    
  • I labeled the nine bottles of Kieffer pear wine and stored them in a cooler.

This is Mary's cross stitch project, today.

Wine bottles heating up for label removal.

• Saturday, 1/14: Fly Tying in Kirksville, MO
  
  • I drove to Kirksville, 50 miles west of us, to attend a free fly tying class put on by the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) at the MDC Northeast Regional Office. Pat Rigby, who works at MDC, was the instructor. He led about 12 of us through fly tying basics with hands-on instruction. Each of us tied 4 flies that we took home (see below). At the end, he showed us how a duck feather is split and tied to a hook to resemble the two wings of a bug. I always thought of fly tying as tedious and complex, but it is not. Pat kept saying, "Mistakes are fine. The fish don't care." Instead, it's easy and I'm hooked. I think I've opened up a new hobby. 
  • An interesting aspect is that I already come in contact with some fly tying materials, such as hackle feathers from a chicken, and deer hair. Marabou is downy feathers from a domestic turkey's belly. The Buff Orpington chickens are full of light-colored downy feathers that could be dyed various colors. A small collection at butchering season would give me plenty of fly tying material.
    
  • There was an MDC biologist attending the class. We talked about Bass Pond on our property. He said to produce bigger fish, catch about 50 fish, stock it with 2 varieties of minnows and bluegills. The bass will eat the minnows while bluegills reproduce. The bluegills become a reproducing source of feed for the bass. In a few months, the size of bass in the pond are about twice their original size.
  • I also asked him about Henry Sever Lake, which is 8.4 or 12.5 miles southwest of us, depending on which route you take. I read it is stocked with muskies. He said new muskie hatchlings were introduced last year to Sever Lake. In two years, they should reach 24- to 30-inches in length.
    
  • After the morning class, that ran from 9 a.m. until noon, I drove through Kirksville to the Aldi store, bought a few things, then to the Adair County Library, where I ate lunch in their parking lot. I tried to update the software of my iPhone using their WiFi, but it was too slow. So, I drove to a McDonalds and used their Wifi. It was much faster. At the library, it was going to take two hours. At McDonalds, it took four minutes. Unfortunately, preparing the upload and installing it took about 45 minutes. The McDonalds staff probably thought I was some thief, sitting there for nearly an hour, hunched over my cell phone.
  • Back home, Mary cut Aida cloth for a number of cross stitch projects. She also vacuumed bugs, a daily event this winter.
  • We watched the second half of Ken Burns' PBS series, The Dust Bowl, plus the extras. Wow, what a mess that was for so many people.

The 1st fly I tied, a zebra midge.

The 2nd fly, an elk hair caddis, but with deer hair.

The 3rd fly is a crackle back woolly worm.

My final fly, a woolly bugger, or in my case, a big mess.