Phew – NaNoWriMo is done!
That's why December 1 is always something I look forward to. The daily slog of word count is over and done and I can relax a bit.
But NaNoWriMo is beautifully useful for getting stuff done. This time it was roughing out the sequel to "An Amish Marriage Agreement" (due to be released Aug/Sept of 2025). The working title for this new story is "Adele's Redemption."
I'll edit this manuscript and send it off to my editor, and then it's on to the next challenge.
I was just about to step outside onto the back porch the other day, when a movement caught my eye. A male pheasant flew into one of the apple trees in the driveway, and sat there apparently gobbling up an apple.
A partridge in a pear tree, Idaho style.
We held our Thanksgiving on Wednesday, since I work on Thursdays. For the last few years, our celebration has been small, just the three of us (Don, myself, Older Daughter), though we spoke to Younger Daughter in the morning at her overseas duty station in Europe.
Older Daughter and I started cooking the day before since, of course, it would be foolish to try and cram all the dishes we wanted to make into one day.
For dessert, I made very easy pistachio pudding pies. These are light desserts, not too heavy after a large meal, and nice and refreshing.
Graham cracker crusts:
Mixing the filling:
And voilà: Dessert is done.
Next I turned my attention to stuffing. Don and Older Daughter like bread stuffing, so I started with that.
Oddly, it's while making bread stuffing that I always piercingly miss Younger Daughter, who used to love to snitch the uncooked mixture. I'm glad we were able to talk with her earlier in the day.
Older Daughter doesn't like onions in her stuffing while Don does, so I divide the batch and everyone's happy. To my way of thinking, Thanksgiving is a yearly indulgence in everyone's quirky tastes and preferences.
My personal once-a-year treat is wild rice stuffing. No one else cares for this lovely side dish, so I can add all the onions I want and no one complains.
On Wednesday, our feast day, I made a small batch of mashed potatoes for Older Daughter, since she still has that childish love of making mashed potato volcanoes with gravy lava...
...while she made a large batch of her famous scalloped potatoes, which are to-die-for good (no photo, sorry).
There are, apparently, a zillion-and-one fancy-dancy ways to prepare a turkey. While I'm sure they're all wonderful methods, I go the easy-peasey route: I rinse and dry the turkey, then slather on some shortening, and it's ready to bake. Honestly, it's the easiest thing ever.
Meanwhile, Older Daughter made a split batch of biscuits and dinner rolls. The biscuits she cut and put aside until after the turkey came out of the oven...
...while the dough for the dinner rolls spent time rising next to the wood stove.
I fetched the turkey platter, which is normally stored in a plastic bag under our bed. Many years ago while preparing Thanksgiving dinner, I lamented that I didn't have a wooden turkey platter like my mother's. Don inquired as to what the turkey platter was like. I sketched out an idea, he disappeared into the shop and emerged two hours later with a solid maple platter. What a blessing it is to have a woodworking husband!
Don did the annual ritual of sharpening knives. The reason for this stems from a time we had our beloved pastor (David "Spike" Shine) join us for Thanksgiving. He offered to carve the turkey, since he was quite good at it. To our everlasting embarrassment, every knife he tried was dull. Don hastily sharpened a knife, and Spike was finally able to carve the bird. Since then, every year without fail, Don gives a bunch of knives a good sharpening on Thanksgiving. (Rest in peace, Spike. We still miss you.)
We had planned to eat around 2 pm, but as it turns out, the turkey was finished about an hour before that.
While the turkey "rested" ...
...we bustled about getting all the last-minute stuff done: Baking the biscuits and rolls, reheating the stuffing and mashed potatoes, making the gravy, etc.
During all this bustle, of course, Mr. Darcy had planted himself inconveniently in the middle of the kitchen floor – practically wrapped around the table leg – and stayed there. Smart dog.
At the last minute, Older Daughter decided to make some deviled eggs for her and Don (a dish that makes me gag), which she does very well.
She also folded the napkins fancy and set the table.
Don carved the turkey while we set some of the side dishes on the table.
It was a feast worth waiting for. And the nice part about an early dinner is everything was washed and cleaned up by 3 pm, giving us time for farm chores and walking the dog before dark, and then a relaxing evening when we could pick at leftovers or have a piece of pie at leisure.
A blessed and bountiful Thanksgiving to everyone!
Almost exactly seven years ago, I posted my requiem to our bread machine.
We bought this bread machine back around 1998 or so, when I finally
realized I don't have much by way of breadmaking skills. Don is a
sandwich guy and loves bread, so if we bought all bread from the store,
it would have cost a fortune. Over the subsequent years, this faithful
machine made literally thousands of loaves at a cost of
probably thirty cents a loaf (ingredients + electricity). Sadly after 20 years, it finally bit the dust.
Yesterday I started a loaf of bread, partly for Don's sandwiches and partly for bread stuffing for Thanksgiving. I started the machine and then began working another project, so I wasn't paying much attention to it.
But after a bit I heard the machine emitting some distressed beeps. And was it kneading? I started paying attention and realized no, it wasn't kneading. And what was that smell?
The smell was electrical. Plus it was kind of "humming." I unplugged it right away, then tried replugging it in. The machine started humming again, and conspicuously refused to knead. Well nuts. Another faithful machine bites the dust. I didn't want to risk an electrical fire, so I unplugged it and took the bucket of bread ingredients out.
But wait, we had yet another identical model on hand. I fetched it from the barn loft, dusted it off, put the bucket with the bread ingredients into it, and voilà: It worked perfectly.
This machine, too, was an inexpensive thrift-store find from several years ago.
Now we're tasked with throwing away the old machine. Maybe in the vain hope some handy person can fix it, I'll put it next to the dumpsters with an explanatory note and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, we'll keep our eyes peeled in thrift stores for yet another Regal Kitchen Pro. They really are excellent machines ... although to be fair, probably almost any thrift-store machine will work fine.
Rest in peace, bread machine.
We missed most of the dramatic bomb cyclone + atmospheric river that blasted the west coast over the last week. These storms did a massive amount of damage over the region, including multiple feet of snow in the mountains that snarled traffic and caused horrific accidents.
We can usually expect the residuals of such storms to hit our inland area within a day or two. To that end, we battened down the hatches and prepared to hunker down for the duration. The rain moved in late Friday night, after I'd gone to bed. We had hopes the newly installed roof-runoff water tank, then about one-third full, would top off. Don (who comes to bed later than I do) planned to let the gutters drain the initial roof runoff (to clean everything) for about half an hour, then divert the runoff into the tank before he came to bed.
Thankfully we had no wind, but it rained and rained and RAINED and rained the blessed night long. Early Saturday morning before dawn, I laid in bed, listening to the pounding on the roof, and thanked God the livestock were snug and dry in the barn.
Or so I thought. When I went out to feed them, this is what I saw:
Well, no one ever said cows were bred for brains, as I always say. To be fair, by the mess left in the barn, it seemed their jaunt into the weather was fairly recent and they had, in fact, spent the night under cover.
I cleaned the barn, and while I dumped the night's leavings on the compost pile, the animals moved back inside.
Once the feeders were full, they all settled in to enjoy breakfast.
Even before attending to the cows, just after I got up (around 5 am, so still dark), I took a flashlight and peered over the edge of the balcony, where the outflow pipes from the water tank were just visible. I saw water flowing out of the pipes, which could mean only one thing: The tank was full to overflowing. Accordingly, I flipped the levers to divert the roof runoff from the tank back to the downspouts. Later I photographed the edges of the overflow pipes, no longer running:
This was the first opportunity to test these outflow pipes, and they worked beautifully.
Later, I lifted the floor hatch on the deck and unscrewed the access hatch on top of the tank. Sure enough, brim-full. Those are the outflow pipes, at the top-right.
Fifteen hundred gallons of water!
Even better, this is a passive and inexhaustible source. This much water will get us through long dry spells, providing both household and livestock water. And every time it rains, we can top off the tank.
Now that the tank is full, we'll add chlorine to keep it pure. We still have no plans to drink it directly from the tank until filtered (or boiled), but the peace of mind that comes with abundant water is impossible to underscore.
I'd almost forgotten this story until a reader's passing comment sparked the memory.
Back in college (I majored in zoology at U.C. Davis), I spent the summer of 1982 working for a graduate student named Hannah Carey who was doing her Ph.D. field research on yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventris).
We were stationed at the White Mountain Research Center. The home office is in Bishop, California, but we were at the Barcroft Station, located at elevation 12,500 feet. I adapted very well to high-altitude work, and spent an extraordinary summer exploring this amazing region.
Except for lab work at the station (fecal analysis of their diet), most of the marmot work was conducted from an elevated blind in a valley meadow, maybe half a mile from the station down a steep slope. The isolation at this spot was total and complete. We spent our days with binoculars in hand, observing the behavior of the marmot colony. We also did a lot of live-trapping of the animals (using Havahart traps), when we painted numbers on their sides for easy identification at a distance.
When the marmots gave their alarm calls, we learned instantly to scan the landscape for predators. Most of the predators at that elevation consisted of golden eagles and coyotes. But one day we heard alarm calls, scanned the land and sky, and spotted a different kind of culprit on the ground. And here's the thing: We couldn't figure out what it was.
It was a large-ish mammal, maybe three feet long, but low to the ground. It sort of galloped, and when it did so I distinctly remember it had a kind of cape-like flare to its fur. Since it was so far away, up the scree slope across the valley, we couldn't get a clear view of it despite our binoculars. We were baffled.
The animal gradually got closer, and finally we were able to identify it. It was a badger.
A badger! Neither Hannah nor I had ever seen one in real life before, and we couldn't believe we saw it at 12,000-foot elevation up in the White Mountains of California. We watched it as it skirted the meadow, with the marmots eyeing it warily and giving their alarm calls. Eventually it disappeared from sight.
As we climbed back up the valley toward the station later that afternoon, Hannah was keen to try to trap the badger in one of the Havahart traps, but I talked her out of it. First of all, the traps she had on hand were perfectly suited to marmots, but too small for a badger. And second – more importantly – badgers are vicious fighters, and there's no possible way she would be able to safely remove it from the trap, much less mark it.
But we both had a lovely glow about the sighting because we knew we had seen something unique. Hannah later reported the observation to wildlife officials, and to the best of my knowledge it became the first (and possibly only) confirmed sighting of a badger at that elevation in recorded science. (From this Wikipedia description of badger habitat: "They are sometimes found at elevations up to 12,000 feet...")
Unfortunately neither of us was credited for the sighting, so my minuscule contribution to science seems to have been lost. Oh well. I know what I saw, and Hannah can confirm it.
Older Daughter came into the living room the other day, laughing her head off. It seems she had been scrolling around the website Realtor.com and stumbled across a listing so extraordinary, she had to share it. She was right. These pix are too good not to share. (Click here to see the rest, though be aware realty listings come and go.)
In the town of Ramona, California, there is a time capsule for sale.
From the outside, the house looks quite "meh." Nothing notable about it, but not bad.
But the inside is a whole different story. Can we say "Seventies"?
It will take a special buyer to fall in love with this place, and a little part of me hopes that whoever gets it will keep the décor intact.
Those of us "of a certain age" remember the decorating madness that plagued the 1970s. Remember when everything in a room had to match?
And never underestimate the cultural impact of the infamous green shag carpeting.
Green, let the records show, is my favorite color. But lime-green plastered all over the house is a bit much.
Kudos to whoever decorated this house to begin with fifty years ago, and never saw fit to alter those decisions.
But yowza, give me earth tones any day of the week.
