Dec. 23-29, 2024

Weather | 12/23, cloudy, 40°, 51° | 12/24, cloudy, 28°, 36° |12/25, fog/mist, 31°, 38° | 12/26, fog, 38°, 48° | 12/27, 0.42" rain/mist, 41°, 48° | 12/28, 0.04" rain, fog, 39°, 51° | 12/29, fog, 39°, 45° |

• Monday, 12/23: Shopping & Baking Goodies
  
  • I drove to Quincy and shopped for a few grocery items. The town was really packed with shoppers and intense traffic. Quincy, IL started as a river and railroad town, so its streets are narrow. Christmas reveals just how confining streets are to heavy traffic in this town. Stop lights went through two or three cycles before I could get through them. I was real happy to get out of town and go back home.
    
  • Bill arrived while I was shopping. He's here until the weekend. He's been busy sending in job applications.
    
  • Mary baked some oatmeal butterscotch chip cookies and made some chocolate peanut clusters.
  • We watched the 2003 film Love Actually, and the 1999 piece starring Patrick Stewart in the  Christmas Carol, both picked out by Bill.
    

• Tuesday, 12/24: Christmas Eve 2024
  
  • When Bill opened the curtain in the upstairs north bedroom, he saw a large raccoon in the top of weeping willow tree stump. It promptly crawled down and rumbled off to the north and disappeared under cedar trees between the chicken coop and the machine shed. We kept the chickens inside for an extra hour to ensure the raccoon was long gone.
  • The specific gravity of the spiced apple wine in the brew bucket was 1.060 and the yeast was quiet, so I put the brew bucket behind the wood stove to heat up the wine must.
    
  • I split and stacked three wheelbarrow loads of mainly maple firewood.
    
  • At one point when I turned the motor off that runs the wood splitter, I heard the sound of a huge flock of birds. It was from hundreds of starlings in the black walnut trees. When they saw me, they flew east to trees surrounding the dry pond. I grabbed two firecrackers and lit them to scare the birds away. Later, while Mary was moving firewood into the house, the starlings returned. She scared them away by whistling and clapping her hands.
    
  • Mary finished making Christmas desserts, which included cherry crisp and pistachio tort.
    
  • We enjoyed a smorgasbord of cheese, crackers, summer sausage, veggies, dip, plus two bottles of wine...pear and apple. The 2023 apple wine tasted perfect with all of the varieties of cheese. The 2021 pear wine was bottled exactly three years ago, to the day.
    
  • We played the board game, Azul, while listening to Christmas music on the record player. All of the records I cleaned a few days ago sounded new, without pops through the speakers.
    

• Wednesday, 12/25: Christmas Day 2024
  
  • This morning, I saw five deer south of the house, heading for our apple trees. I marched outside with just house shoes and a coat to chase them away.
    
  • We unwrapped presents after eating breakfast. They were all really nice gifts.
    
  • We received a call from Katie. She thanked us for one gift we didn't give her...some vacuum-wrap plastic to store food in the freezer. Mary, Bill, and I looked dumbfounded and told her that wasn't from us. She didn't receive some other gifts that we all ordered...books and a bicycle tire pump. I looked up the shipment and she received those items. She texted the coworker who wrapped her presents, who is on vacation in Mexico right now. Katie mentioned to her coworker about the vacuum-wrap boxes and Katie was told to open them. The missing gift mystery was solved. There were more wrapped gifts. Her coworker put them in the vacuum-wrap boxes and taped the boxes shut so nice and neatly that they looked like boxes originally shipped from the factory. When I asked Katie about skiing, she said the snow has melted in Anchorage, so skiing is not possible right now.
    
  • Bill and I talked to my mother on a phone call to her. Hank brought most of the food and they enjoyed a nice Christmas dinner that she fixed up. Eastern Montana had freezing rain, which is now thawing.
    
  • Bill picked out two comedies that we watched. They were Mr. Beans Holiday (2007), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).
    

• Thursday, 12/26: Mist, Splitting Wood, Yahtzee, and Dandelion Wine
  
  • We saw fog throughout the day. All surfaces in buildings with open ends, such as the machine shed and the woodshed, are moist.
    
  • A morning check of the spiced apple wine revealed a specific gravity of 1.030. It has a pleasant apple and clove smell and the yeast is fizzing nicely.
  • I split three wheelbarrow loads of firewood and stacked them in the woodshed to finish splitting up all of the wood that we cut up last Wednesday (12/18). The stack in the woodshed goes up and down. As I put more wood on the stack, Mary pulls it off and takes it in the house.
  • Mary worked on a cross stitch project called Moonlight, featuring wolves howling in front of a full moon.
  • Bill, Mary, and I played a seven-game session of Yahtzee. I won. Bill took second. Mary was in third place. It's all about luck.
  • We enjoyed a bunch of crackers, veggies, and cheese (10 varieties). We also shared a bottle of 2021 dandelion wine. It has a very orange color (see photo, below). This wine tasted excellent. It's hard describe the flavor. The wine tastes like dandelion, but in a good way.

  

  2021 Dandelion Wine.
  

• Friday, 12/27: Racking 2 Spiced Apple Wines
  
  • All day long we experienced fog, rain, and mist. On our last dog walk at night, we looked up and there was Jupiter shining through a crack in the clouds.
  • While eating breakfast, I saw a cardinal in the sweet cherry tree while looking out the west living room window. It was super bright red in the wet mist.
    
  • Mary reviewed all the seeds that we have, cross-referenced them to a book she uses to determine the longevity of various seed types, and then made an list of garden seeds that we need for the upcoming growing season. It will be $93, which initially seems like a lot until we realize how much food we put away each year from the garden. It's worth a lot more than close to $100 if we bought it all from a grocery store.
    
  • Bill and I racked two spice apple wines. It was the third racking of batch one. The wine is still cloudy, but we got a healthy amount of fines off this racking. The specific gravity was 0.999 and the pH was 3.1. We tasted a little bit of the wine. The flavor was wonderful...a distinct apple and clove taste. I lost about 375 ml of liquid in the racking. The remaining liquid fit exactly into a 3-gallon carboy. The specific gravity of batch 2 was 1.019 at 3 p.m. By 6 p.m., it was 1.015, so I racked it out of the brew bucket and into a 3-gallon carboy and a half gallon jug. The pH was 3.0. With Bill helping, we racked the two wines and washed all dishes in very quick order.
    
  • We watched a film picked out by Bill. It was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989).
    

• Saturday, 12/28: Bill Leaves For His Apartment
  
  • We've now experienced several days of misty, foggy weather. It's getting old!
  • We said goodbye to Bill. He left after we ate a midday omelet stuffed with veggies with Ranch dip on top.
    
  • Mary read a bunch while I looked at a ton of YouTube videos about chainsaws.
    
  • Mary and I both vacuumed up flies and Asian ladybugs several times throughout the day.
    

• Sunday, 12/29: 34th Anniversary
  • Mary and I celebrated our 34th year of marriage, today. On Dec. 29, 1990, we were married in Red Lake Falls, MN, in a private ceremony in our rented house at the time. Several Red Lake Falls residents warmed up the small two-story home, while outside the thermometer rose to -29°. The next day, exhausted, we binge watched and taped the entire version of Ken Burns' The Civil War. We waited until summer to took a honeymoon trip to the Quetico Provincial Park, which is north of Minnesota's Voyageurs National Park.
  • Mary fixed up a shrimp dinner for our anniversary. The shrimps were baked in garlic wine with sliced garlic on top. Dipped in shrimp cocktail sauce, they were delicious.
  • I did several small jobs today, such as moving the Stihl trimmer from the woodshed to in the laundry room, moving the wooden orchard ladder from the woodshed to the machine shed, taking remaining switchel jugs down from apple trees, and storing away blankets we use for covering up plants.
  • Plato was outside with me. I followed him into the machine shed as his nose led him to a rubber garbage can in the east end of the building. Inside was an opossum. I put Plato in the house, then moved the garbage can to behind the machine shed, tipped it on its side and let the poor guy meander off into the north woods. Back inside the machine shed, I put a piece of hardware cloth over the top of the garbage can and weighed it down with bricks, preventing future critters from falling into the container.
  • I heard and saw snow geese fly over the north part of our property. I also heard trumpeter swans.
  • For three days in a row, we've received eggs from our hens. We went several weeks without eggs from them, so we had to buy eggs for the first time in years to get us through the Holidays.
  • Mary and I enjoyed a bottle of 2023 cherry wine. It's good wine, but I suspect this year's cherry wine is tastier.
  • Former President Jimmy Carter died today. He was 100.