This cartoon was created by the talented writer and artist Wren Everett and appeared in the Jan/Feb/Mar 2026 issue of Backwoods Home Magazine (and is reprinted with permission). I thought it was incredibly apropos, considering the storm that hit the eastern two-thirds of America this past weekend.
(Click to enlarge)
There's a lot to be said for a prepared lifestyle. Stay warm and safe, everyone!
For the last few days, we're been hearing dire weather reports about the massive storm and bitter cold bearing down on two-thirds of the U.S.
Apparently this is the worst storm system in something like 40 years and is NOT something to ignore or take lightly. Officials have been urging people to batten down the hatches and prepare accordingly.
Needless to say, lots of store shelves are being stripped bare.
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Meanwhile, the western U.S. is under a high-pressure system that is preventing any moisture from hitting the ground. We've been cloudy, below freezing, and bone-dry for weeks. There isn't a drop of rain or snow anywhere in the forecast, and the locals are getting worried about a severe fire season this summer.
I guess it's a weird winter for everyone.
Stay safe and warm, dear readers, and if you're in the path of this storm, report in as you can how you're faring.
Dear readers, thank you for your forbearance as Don and I coped with finishing up a massive production run of tankards after Older Daughter's shop accident on New Year's Eve.
Here's some of the things we've been doing over the last three weeks. The production run was split into two parts: A huge first part of about 270 pieces, and a smaller second part of about 75.
We had tankards everywhere in the house, on virtually every flat surface.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this was one of the biggest production runs we've done over the span of the last 33 years.
Here we're testing tankards, where we fill them with water to see if any leak. We had to do this in stages, since there were so many.
The house was in absolute flippin' chaos during this time. Tankards in various stages of completion, boxes for packing, bubble wrap, newspapers, guarantee cards ... what a mess.
In the photo below, for example, Older Daughter and I are working at the kitchen table getting tankards ready to pack, while Don is in the background gluing up the next batch on a card table. Chaos chaos chaos.
Here's the newspaper station. I'm spreading out full sheets of newspaper from the pile on the right, while discarding half-sheets on the floor to the left (we'll use them for fire starters). We need full-size sheets of newspapers for wrapping tankards for packing.
Here we're prepping boxes. BIG boxes.
Packing boxes. Three boxes are stacked to the left, two to the right, and the one we just finished filling is in the center. We roll each tankard in newspaper before packing.
Six huge boxes ready to ship. I'm fairly certain this is the largest number of boxes we've ever shipped at one time. Even the UPS guy said it could have made its own stand-alone pickup.
With the bulk of the production run out the door, we were able to concentrate on the smaller 75-piece portion. Here's we're coating the insides of the tankards.
And here are the final two boxes, packed and ready to tape shut and address.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the final shipment.
No, really, I mean it. This is the final shipment of tankards. After 33 years in business, 29 by Don and myself and the last four years by Older Daughter, we're closing down. Older Daughter has already notified her wholesale customers.
It's bittersweet, of course, but the painful reality is it's no longer cost-effective for making a living. Sure it was insane hours, erratic income, and the occasional injury, but over the three decades Don and I ran it, we were able to support a family, pay a mortgage, raise our children, and always be home with them.
But things have changed. Prices for all the components (wood, glue, varnish, sanding belts, saw blades, spray guns, bubble wrap, boxes, shipping) have skyrocketed, but the tankard prices couldn't be raised enough to compensate and provide a livable wage. In other words, it was becoming less and less profitable. While Older Daughter's injury was the deciding factor, there's no doubt the increasing cost of doing business convinced her it was better to let it go.
However Older Daughter has some exciting new plans for her future. I'm not at liberty to discuss what they are at the moment, but she has some wonderful opportunities opening up.
While this final shipment is officially the end of an era, Don and I know better than to claim we'll never make another tankard. As the saying goes, never say never. Economic reality might necessitate a change of plans. We're thoroughly enjoying our new careers as full-time freelance writers, but it's good to know we have a backup source of income should we need it.
But for now ... this is the final shipment.
A few readers have expressed concern about the blog silence. My apologies! We're all doing fine except we're still slammed with getting this massive tankard order out the door. We hope to ship off the last pieces this upcoming Thursday, at which point we will heave an enormous sigh of relief.
To top things off, my writing schedule suddenly multiplied. I sent off a proposal (synopsis + three chapters) to my Harlequin editor Thursday morning, and did a podcast interview for Mother Earth News on Thursday afternoon, and now I'm working on a Countryside article which is due Tuesday. I also have at least two articles I need to submit to Backwoods Home Magazine as soon as possible, and two more articles due early next month for Backyard Poultry Magazine. This is, of course, on top of the usual morning milking and afternoon barn-cleaning schedule.
Older Daughter's finger is still painful, but it's healing well. There's a ligament or tendon in there that catches her with a snap of pain when she stretches out her hand too fast, but the finger itself isn't causing any direct pain and there was no infection thanks to the emergency room physician who did a good job cleaning it, and Older Daughter's diligent after-care of the wound.
Thank you for understanding about the dearth of blog posts. More later!
Every winter in our area, the elk move from the high country to lower elevations. This means we suddenly start seeing them all over the place.
Interestingly, we've had an extraordinarily mild winter so far (a state of affairs that, frankly, is starting to worry us; will this correlate to a summer of wildfires?), so the elk have plenty of browse.
Coincidentally, we've also started noticing damage to our fencing.
Elk are massive animals – you don't really appreciate just how huge they are until you're up close to one – so it's no surprise that our modest fences get damaged by them.
It's one of those give-and-takes of country living. Elk are beautiful animals. Damaged fences is one of the prices we pay for enjoying their presence.
Two related news stories caught my attention this week. One was entitled "They Can't Read: [Hoover Institution Senior Fellow} Victor Davis Hanson Shares Horror Stories That Drove Him Out Of University." The other piece is called "Gen Z are arriving to college unable to even read a sentence – professors warn it could lead to a generation of anxious and lonely graduates."
As the titles imply, there are entire cohorts of young people emerging from public education functionally illiterate. The latter article begins: "As Gen Z ditch books at record levels, students are arriving to classrooms unable to complete assigned reading on par with previous expectations. It's leaving colleges no choice but to lower their expectations. One shocked professor has described young adults showing up to class, unable to read a single sentence."
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The crisis of literacy goes back decades, arguably generations. "Why Johnny Can't Read" was first published in 1955 and drew national attention to the failures of the "look-say" method of teaching (as opposed to phonics) that signaled the beginning of the end for literacy.
We are so obsessed with books in our family that this hits home ... hard.
We've also had lively discussions in our household about the issue. Is reading even "necessary" in our modern society? Clearly illiteracy isn't an insuperable handicap for everyone. History is rife with brilliant people who succeeded despite their inability to read. Today's younger generations are clearly succeeding even though reading is no longer a priority.
I guess what I find distressing is our modern culture seems to actively cultivate functional illiteracy. Children are surrounded by screens instead of books. They're encouraged to watch videos about something rather than reading about it. Parents don't model reading; they model viewing. Artificial intelligence is poised to take the need to read away from us. Children no longer grow up with the expectation that reading is not only educational, but fun. University professors are reaping the rewards of this change in attitude and ability.
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Recently a reader related a frustrating experience with an AI bot and asked rhetorically, "You'll do better finding your answers in a book somewhere. What will we do when books are gone?"
An excellent question. We're on a personal mission in our family not to let that happen. Let's hope future generations are able to overcome their illiteracy.
I made a batch of cheese today. I was busy doing other things as well, but I used my faithful kitchen timers to keep me on track for all the steps necessary to make cheddar.
Everything was going fine UNTIL I neglected to turn the (low) heat off the double-boiler pots at one particular step, warming the water in the outer pot well beyond the necessary 100F. I immediately removed the inner pot to let the curds cool and added cool water to the outer pot to bring the temperature back down to 100F. Well, oops. After that, the cheesemaking proceeded without incident.
But Don and I laughed about how delicate cheesemaking sometimes seems. Slight alterations in temperature, length of time the curds cook, and how long it's pressed and under which weights can often make a completely different cheese.
"What we need," he said, "is a 'Cheese AI' where we can ask it this kind of question. 'I left the heat on too long at this particular step and the curds got a bit warmer than 100F. What kind of cheese will this make?' Then the AI can respond with something like, 'Why, that will make Stanford-on-Rye cheese, first made by Goodwife Delma Osgood in 1706...'"
This batch of cheddar (hopefully it's still cheddar) has to age for at least two months, so I have no idea what, if any, my temporary lapse of attention will do to the final product.
If only there was a "cheese AI" I could query...
Don, as you may recall, suffers from a malady we dubbed "Poliphobia" – namely, a "fear" of cities.
This is not a real phobia (an irrational fear), of course, but rather an intense dislike bordering on hatred of urban areas. "I didn't used to be this way," he says. Like me, he's spent many years living in – and even enjoying – urban environments; but the older he gets, the less tolerance he has for such settings.
For those not afflicted, this aversion is difficult to understand. But from the Eaton Rapids Joe blog comes this gem:
One of the reasons I dislike visiting cities is that I am no longer calibrated to them. I don't have a solid baseline of what is normal and what is not-normal.
YES!!! He gets it! It's not just us!
Sorry for the silence, dear readers. Don and I have been drowning in tankards for the last few days.
To update our disastrous New Year's Eve and New Year's Day incidents: My mother continues to remain stable after rallying from what we all thought were her final moments. She's back at the nursing home, though she's in isolation (doubtless because of the pneumonia) and my dad is required to suit up in PPE before visiting her. The consensus is if her bouts of abrupt pneumonia continue, the family will turn to hospice.
Older Daughter's finger is on the mend, but she's severely limited in what she can do ... and that includes completing a massive 350+ piece order of tankards that must reach their destination within two weeks. Therefore Don and I have taken over the production run.
Don has been spending hours in the shop on the power tools. At various stages in the assembly process, he brings batches to the house, where I take over assembly. Right now the house is overrun with mugs.
Nearly every surface is covered in various style tankards in various stages of completion.
As an example, yesterday evening Older Daughter and I sat at the kitchen table to work on the smallest-size tankards in the repertoire, the coffee-sized mugs. These have solid, rather than multi-colored, sides. Older Daughter assembled the side pieces into groups of six, which I then taped and stacked for gluing.
These are the groups of six sides which will get taped.
Stacks of taped tankards. Altogether there were about 90 tankards to glue in this particular batch.
While I glued, Older Daughter sat opposite and entertained me by reading out loud various dramas posted on Reddit.
By the time of evening chores, I had worked my way through a bit over half of the three stacks.
The freshly glued tankards were left to dry for several hours (overnight, in this case).
Today Don will be working on another batch of the production run in the shop, which he'll then bring into the house for me to glue up.
Older Daughter is antsy and bored and apologetic for the need for us to finish the production run, but such is life. We're just very grateful her injury wasn't worse.
Anyway, that accounts for my blog silence over the last few days. Our deepest thanks for all of your prayers during our difficulties.
We are now two days into the New Year, and now I feel I can write about what our New Year's Eve was like. In a nutshell, it was very, very rough.
My mother (who, as you remember, is now in a nursing home) was hospitalized on Dec. 30 with pneumonia and a blood infection. It didn't sound good. Then on Dec. 31, the doctor (not her regular doctor, but the one on call over the holiday weekend) said she wasn't responding to treatments. He summoned the immediate family (my dad and all my brothers; I'm too far away) for a meeting on New Year's Day.
Doctors don't summon immediate family for no reason. We were braced for the worst. When I talked to my youngest brother (who lives geographically closest to my parents and has been a rock for them), he said he fully expected Mom to go into hospice. He's a big strong man, my brother, but he was crying as he told me this.
Since I couldn't physically be present at the meeting, my brother asked me to stay by the phone on New Year's Day in case my input was needed for whatever decisions were being made about my mother's care.
Needless to say we were a gloomy household on New Year's Eve. Younger Daughter (stationed in Europe) was traveling, and my brother urged me not to ruin her trip because she couldn't do anything anyway. Older Daughter was very upset about the news and buried herself in work, since she has a large wholesale order going out shortly.
On the evening of New Year's Eve, Don and I decided to call our pastor and explain the situation, and ask for prayers. This good man was – literally – in the middle of a prayer on the phone when Older Daughter came crashing into house from the shop, holding up a bloody and mangled finger. While working on the router, a piece of wood snapped and her finger connected with the router blade. She was in terrible pain, covered in blood and sawdust.
We yelled to our pastor that we had to go, and immediately embarked on a hasty first-aid for Older Daughter. We bundled her into the car and Don drove her to the emergency room, a half-hour drive away.
After they left, I called our pastor back and explained what happened, noting grimly that this was a helluva way to end the year. He finished the prayer he had started earlier, and then – without asking – went to meet Don and Older Daughter at the emergency room. (Apparently he does this a lot with congregants. They know him there in the emergency room.)
Don and Older Daughter were back within a couple of hours. OD's finger is swathed in gauze, of course, but it will mend. The router had chewed off the tip, but the injury didn't reach the bone and she should recover full use after it heals. Heavens above, it could have been way worse.
So New Year's Day dawned, and Don went out to the shop to take over the production run of tankards for Older Daughter's wholesale order. I, meanwhile, stayed inside by the phone, waiting for word on my mom. I took down the Christmas tree and cleaned the house as a sort of occupational therapy. Older Daughter slept much of the day, exhausted.
It wasn't until evening that my brother called with surprising news: My mother had rallied!
This took, literally, all of us by surprise. The entire family was braced for the worst. My brother said Mom looked terrible, was mostly comatose, and hadn't eaten in days (she had a feeding tube). My dad had tried to wake her up several times to no avail.
My dad tried to wake her up one last time. She actually woke up, but was terribly groggy. But then, miraculously, she kind of blinked herself awake over the span of about five minutes and became much more alert. She was responsive and cognizant and talking (as best she could; her speech was badly impacted by the stroke). Her vitals stabilized. The doctor was just as surprised as the rest of us by her rapid improvement, and decided to belay any recommendations for hospice.
My brother said Dad went from the darkest gloom to incandescent happiness in the span of an hour.
Mom is still hospitalized and she is by no means out of danger, but the likelihood of her imminent departure seems to have passed.
Phew. It's been a roller-coaster of emotions over the last couple of days, let me tell you.
On a more positive note, something interesting and even amusing happened to Older Daughter while being treated in the emergency room, which I'll explain later in another blog post.
In the meantime, prayers for my parents would be deeply appreciated.
A few days ago, I mentioned in passing that I made my first batch of Parmesan cheese over Christmas. A reader asked for more details. I don't have a lot of photos to accompany the process, in part because so many steps are similar to making cheddar (review this post to get an idea).
When I first got into cheesemaking many years ago, I had extremely spotty success because I was trying to follow advice on the internet. Then I purchased a book that proved to be a game-changer: Home Cheesemaking by Ricki Carroll (full disclosure: this is an Amazon affiliates link). If anyone is serious about making cheese, this is THE reference book to get, with extremely easy-to-follow directions as well as a wealth of information on cultures, starters, rennet, techniques, etc. The New England Cheesemaking Supply Company (founded by the author of the book) is also the place to go for cultures, cheese molds, rennet, etc.
In years past, I've made lots of cheddar, mozzarella, and cream cheese, which we use all the time. For whatever reason, however, I never delved into either Parmesan or Swiss cheeses (two of our favorites). I haven't tried Swiss yet (I need to obtain a special bacterial culture), but that will be my next conquest.
Before getting started on Parmesan, I needed to culture some thermophilic culture. I did this by heating about a gallon and a half of skim milk in a double boiler arrangement (critical!) to 180F, then letting it cool to 110F. I added the culture, then needed to keep the milk at 110F for six to eight hours, until the milk achieves a thick yogurt-like consistency.
To maintain the temperature for this long, I kept the pots on the stove burner, covered with layers of towels, and checked the temperature frequently. If the culture needed a bit of heat, I removed the towels and turned on the burner for a minute or two, then turned off the heat and covered the pots with the towels again.
The water jacket provided by nesting two pots together as a double boiler makes all the difference in being able to control and maintain temperature. This is just as important while cultivating the starter culture as it is for making cheese.
After the culture was ripe, I used a half-cup (four-ounce) measuring cup...
...to scoop it into muffin tins, which I then froze.
Four ounces of culture is the standard amount to add to a two-gallon batch of cheese, so it's handy to have it frozen in these increments.
For making Parmesan cheese, here are the necessary supplies and equipment:
• Two large pots, nested to make a double boiler
• 2 gallons of low-fat milk (I goofed the first batch by using regular-fat milk)
• 4 ounces of thermophilic starter
• 1/2-teaspoon liquid animal rennet diluted in 1/4-cup cool unchlorinated water
• A cheese press and 2-pound cheese mold
• 2 lbs. cheese salt + 1 gallon water for a brine
Here are the directions:
• Heat milk to 90F. Add thermophilic starter and mix well. Cover and let ripen for 30 minutes.
• Making sure the milk is still at 90F, add the rennet and mix well. Cover and let set for 30 minutes.
• Cut the curds into 1/4-inch cubes.
• Heat the curds to 100F, raising the temperature two degrees every five minutes. Stir often.
• Raise the temperature of the curds three degrees every five minutes until the temperature reaches 124F. Stir often. The curds should be very small and squeak when chewed. Allow the curds to set for five minutes.
• Pour off the whey (I use a mesh bag so as not to lose any of the curds). In the photo below, Don is holding the mesh bag around a wide-mouth funnel while I scoop out the curds and whey from the large pot.
• Line a two-pound cheese mold with a thin cloth (cheesecloth or, in my case, a piece of clean muslin). Pack the curds into the mold and press at 5 lbs. of pressure for 15 minutes.
• Turn the cheese, then press at 10 lbs. of pressure for 30 minutes.
• Turn the cheese, then press at 15 lbs. of pressure for 2 hours.
• Turn the cheese, then press at 20 lbs. of pressure for 12 hours.
• In a non-corrosive container (I use a plastic bucket), mix 2 lbs. cheese salt or non-iodized salt into 1 gallon of water to make a brine. Soak the cheese in the brine for 24 hrs. at room temperature. In the photo below, since the cheese wanted to float...
...we anchored it down with a cup filled with coins. Weird solution, but it worked.
• Remove the cheese from the brine and pat dry. (Reserve the brine for future uses.) Age the cheese at 55F and 85 percent humidity for at least 10 months. Turn the cheese over daily for the first several weeks, then weekly thereafter. Remove any mold with a cloth dampened with vinegar.
• After the cheese has aged for two months, rub the surface with olive oil to keep the rind and cheese from drying out.
Here are the two batches of Parmesan I've made so far. The larger one came from the full-fat milk I (mistakenly) used; the smaller one came from low-fat milk.
This, so far, is my experience making Parmesan. The next step is ageing, so it will be interesting to see what kind of cheese these two types of milk produce.
