Frosting...no Pumpkins

Saturday we had a weird little storm. It snowed most of the afternoon with an inch or two of accumulation. What was odd was that it stuck to everything.
And stayed.





On Sunday morning it was still glued in place on every tree and wire. That is a very unusual phenomenon. Normally you can expect either wind or rain when the snow sticks like that and it usually arrives very quickly after the end of the snow.





Although I am no fan of winter, it was amazing to look out the big windows Saturday evening and see the trees over in the town across the river, coated in white and lit up by the street lights. It may be trite to say it but it looked like a Christmas card.
PS, this post was written and scheduled before I read about the accident below.

I Heard This Happening

Weezer tour bus crashes. Heard a lot of sirens and all this morning early. Had no idea what was going on and I had forgotten it until I read the news.

Not music I listen to, but Alan likes them. Glad the injuries weren't serious.

Here is an update from the band website.

Exclusively for Dickiebo

Sunday Stills...Pets

This is an oldie, but a real favorite of mine. I had a picture of the cat all ready to go but he is on a certain list that precludes me glorifying him just now...the little stinker.

Top pic is Liz and Foolish. Foolish is a milk cow now but still pretty gentle.

And here is that rare creature....hardly ever seen...a border collie hibernating. Dear old Gael (who has NEVER bitten me)...in her usual pose this time of year. She likes snow about as much as I do...not much that is....



For more Sunday Stills.....

What Not To Do

If your gentle, amazingly well-behaved house cat goes tearing out the door to fight with a barn cat when you open it to let the dog in..(he has never, never even tried to go outdoors before.....)

Well, the thing not to do is to go out and try to get him back. The &^%^^&& cats rolled right across my leg, biting and clawing. I finally had to separate them with a canoe paddle.

So I am all clawed up.
Nasty. Painful.
I shoulda left the little stinker out there.

Are You a Redneck If.....

You bring in the little solar-charged yard lights that you got for your birthday?

And put them in the houseplants in the big front windows?

Kinda like all season Christmas lights....

Really economical ones........

This Oughta Raise Your Eyebrows

John Bunting had this today:

Organic Foods Made in China

Oh, yay. I don't see much point in organic myself (sacrilege I know, but there it is). However, with all the fine quality control that particular nation exerts over its dairy products and food ingredients, I can just imagine what their organic standards are like. I think if you pay a higher price for a premium product you probably ought to have some assurance that you are actually getting it. Doesn't seem to be the case here.

Oh, and it is pouring this morning, torrential, all-consuming, all-soaking downpours. I haven't even had the doggies out yet. And dag nab it, the boss just fixed the driveway the day before yesterday after the last set of monsoons took it out. I know even though the sun isn't up yet that it is gone again.

Nippy

The musical brother and me at that family get together a while back
Photo shamelessly stolen from niece's Facebook

Gettin' nippy here in the North Country. All was frosted this morning, with the heifers blowing smoke rings as they huddled against the south wall of the barn soaking up thin, early sunlight.

Sure pretty like that. When it is sharp and cold you can see for miles and hear the geese calling about that far too. The moon was so bright on its way down this morning that you could see that it was not just a round, flat disc in the sky, but rather a big, fat, sphere. Wish I had had time to go back in for the camera, but the cows were waiting, along with Liz who went out early to get a good start on the day.

Missed some amazing shots on the trip to take Becky back last Sunday as well. The mountains around Indian Lake were covered with a thin coat of wet, icy snow. It was grey and cloudy, but narrow spotlights of sun brought them into blazing focus, with threads of fog flowing off them and merging with fuzzy-edged snow clouds like chilly silver. On the way home it was actually snowing up there and it was like a curtain going up and down as they came briefly into view and than vanished in whirling clouds. The mountains never disappoint us it seems, although we still haven't seen a moose. We keep staring into every bog and swamp and tamarack-spiked little black lake, but alas no alces alces to be seen.

DELAP

Dairy Economic Loss Assistance Payment Program

Some fairly fresh info HERE.

And HERE is some PDF governmentese on the situation. There is real desperation in the dairy world despite some minor (but welcome) increases in the farmgate milk price.

If I Haven't Had Much to Say

Things have been so crazy here..... Just no time to get it all down. Been fighting for three months with the ISP/cable/phone company over some incorrect billing they perpetrated on us. Got to the point of contacting the Attorney General and the Public Service Commission over that situation.

They turned off all our stuff Sunday, which was nasty.....thank God Liz has a cell phone... I guess that situation may be, possibly, could be, I hope, I hope, resolved now. I would not be exaggerating if I told you that in the past three months I have spent at least five hours on hold and been hung up on disconnected more times than I can count. Had I not carefully written down everything that was promised to me when we first took the deal to get the service with the speedy birdie logo, and logged the time, date, content, and the name of the employee I was being bamboozled by for every one of the multitudinous, increasing acrimonious calls I made, I would have been left paying twenty bucks more a month than I was promised.....and as far as that goes I still don't actually have a corrected bill in my hand....

We took Becky back to Potsdam to finish out the semester Sunday. Bringing her home and back took two whole days. I own a run down little cabin in the Adirondacks, no power or running water and not on any lake or anything...just a little shanty stuck in the woods. Alan and I both had that odd tingly, spidey sense that we should visit on the way home Sunday. So we did.

The cabin isn't really ON the way home as far as that goes, but we wanted some balsam fir boughs and there are firs there so....we took the long, winding, miserable run across the Bleeker Benson road and stopped in.

Good thing we did. Somebody had broken out one of the big back windows to get inside. Alan climbed in too as we didn't have the keys with us. No sign of damage and nothing missing that he saw, which is amazing. It has been burglarized before and usually the results are somewhat different.

Have I ever told you about the time thieves broke in and stole all the light bulbs and every other thing that wasn't nailed down? They also took one of those huge, cabinet style record player, stereo, radio sets that were popular along about in the late seventies. I am talking FURNITURE here. I'll bet it weighed as much as a Volkswagen. It was up a cramped and nervous-making narrow little open stairway, in the loft style upstairs bedroom. We would have moved it out ourselves but for the daunting thought of getting it down those stairs.

That and the fact that it hadn't worked in years.
(Thanks guys for getting it out of there for us.)

This time Alan picked up a few things that were lying around that had been left behind, including a nice old iron frying pan, which I will use to cook out at camp (Pecks that is) next summer. He will have to get back up there with his buddy and board up the broken window....oh, and we did get some fir boughs.

More Horses in Strange Places

Sunday Stills....the Letter T

Trotting

For more Sunday Stills

Linkie

If you are reader who links to me...and I don't link to you...and you would like me to link to you, please leave me a note in the comments and I will happily rectify that situation.
Thanks

In Retrospect

This is about how I felt after dinner yesterday.

I hope you all had as good a time as you could yesterday, with family, friends and a fine festival of foodiness.

And thankfulness.

We did...we have so much to be thankful for and yesterday was no exception. Thanks go to Liz for cooking a fabulous feast all by herself. How many 23-year-olds can cook and serve an entire traditional Thanksgiving dinner? Six pies...including a mince pie just for me because I am the only one who likes it. I will freeze individual slices and have pie for a long time to come....plus peach for Alan and apple and pumpkin for everybody. And she got the dressing just right and made a lot of it, without frying the microwave like I did a couple of years ago. The turkey was just right too....and the potatoes and every other thing as well. She worked at it for three days.....I am so proud of her....and it all was so very good.

I am thankful that our Breezey 375 is home. It feels complete and right here now. And she is a great help in so many ways. We missed her a lot. It is going to be miserable to take her back on Sunday.... Can't wait for the next break.

And I am thankful that those &%#** Jersey heifers that jumped the fence didn't get any farther than the 30-acre lot before Alan and his friend happened upon them while out hunting and brought them back in.

I am also thankful that the friend, who lost his very expensive cell phone way up in back....way, way, way up in back under the power lines....was able to find it, after his dad gave him a firmly worded ultimatum on that topic. (Along the lines of get back there and look for it and don't come home without it. lol) They looked and looked (finding in the course of the search my gun sling, which Alan lost a couple of deer hunts ago) and finally stopped to talk. Alan asked the friend something about looking for the phone, the esteemed young friend looked down between his feet...right where he was standing...and there it was! I suspect he was even more thankful that I was.

We had a wonderful day yesterday...food, family, friends and peaceful contentment. (Not to mention Sunday chair naps for the old folks.) Today it is back to sweating the finances and trying to do right...but the interlude was fine and I liked it.

Wishing

All of our friends and family, across the river,

across the country, around the world and around our home town

a very Happy Thanksgiving.

One of the things we are most thankful for is all of you.

Have a great day.

Tales of the Deer Stand

The waters were still in the Adirondacks yesterday...so many lakes, so many mirrors

To answer requests for the details of the deer hunt..... Hunter-in-Chief went out to his stand in the old pasture before milking. Saw three, shot one, thought he missed it. Chased all over the hill looking for it, following some incredibly lively deer, finally gave up and went back to look where he first shot. There was a nice doe. The ones he had been chasing were completely different deer, which explained their amazing stamina and agility. (Anyone who professes that a .243 isn't enough gun for deer is mistaken I fear.)



This deer was amazingly fat, with 2.5 inches of fat on her hinder parts. She was a big un too, very heavily muscled. Having a fisheries and wildlife student, who has studied meat cutting is a pleasantly advantageous thing I must say. Instead of a few haggled up steaks and a lot of stew meat (we process our own), we have tenderloin steaks, London Broil cuts and numerous other tasty dinner options. For farmers who have been out of meat for weeks and can't get our beefer processed just now that pile of frozen venison on shelf number one in the freezer is like Thanksgiving and Christmas rolled into one.

BTW, I took some pictures of the carcass before we processed it...just to show how big it was. If you want to see them I will put them up....maybe over on the View so I don't offend any sensibilities. Let me know if you do want to see them.



Update: A six point buck has just joined the doe. The kid was only out of the house about twenty minutes.... we had an outlaw from town stop and offer today to take the kid out and teach him to hunt. I kinda didn't know what to say to him....except maybe no thanks

Check out the odd asymmetry of the antlers on this guy

Update number 2...you have to check out Jan's blog for the darnedest story about deer and hunting that I have ever seen.....bar none! Do take time to watch the video. The ending is simply beyond belief!!

Hoss's in Long Lake

Do click and zoom. This is an incredible store and we were so glad we stopped. Two floors of all things Adirondack. They even have those little balsam fir incense thingies my grandma used to buy when we were kids. It was like stepping back in time!
And check out that center pic...guess who's home for the holiday!

On the Menu Last Night

Potatoes from Pines...we bought a hundred pounds for twenty bucks and they are really nice!

Beets, frozen during the summer.......

And.......... dum, da, dum, dum......venison.

Macro Monday

These cool and sometimes downright cold fall days have their upsides right along with the down. Many days we are greeted with sunrises of peach and apricot with every blade of grass frosted like a birthday cake for winter. Nights are surrounded by the sweet lullaby of sleepy geese rocking in the cradle of the river. They are flowing south now like pepper from a shaker, some days thousands at a time. Yesterday early one big flock flew north toward the river while a second surged west toward a cornfield gleaning party. They crossed each other in flight like origami on the wing. I waited and watched to see if they collided or broke apart, but one flock was a few feet above the other and they slipped by easily, barking like a big batch of beagles.

Even the weeds have their lovely moments, whether it is the frost coated goldenrod or this sprig of ordinary catnip painted purple by the freezing night time temperatures. This morning it is downright shiverish, which just makes that first cup of coffee all the more welcome.

For more Macro Monday

Sunday Stills...Horses

This is my favorite horse pic. This horse and another live on our way over to the college. They always look so color-coordinated out in their field.


Had to use the archives for this challenge. Our only horse these days is a mini named Jack and he would NOT cooperate. I did get a nice pic of one of his feet.....For more Sunday Stills...

****Happy Birthday, Scott!