Signs of spring

I was at my computer yesterday when a terrible racket caught my attention. A large flock of blackbirds had settled momentarily in the third oak, and boy howdy, they were raising a ruckus!

Noisy blackbirds in the third oak

I have yet to see my first robin, but Terry tells me they’re back. The Canada geese are everywhere. While one would expect them to be flying north at this time of year, I see them flying in all directions. I’m guessing migratory patterns have broken down as geese have adapted to suburban life.

Sara is displaying odd behavior. She pulls her head in and walks backwards. I think she might be at the bottom of the pecking order, and that this is defensive behavior. We’ll have to keep an eye on it. As the snow melts, the chickens have more room to run around outside. Hopefully that will take care of the pecking problem.

Della is holding her own in the face of her terminal kidney disease.  She loves Terry the best. It’s not fair. I feed her! I also am the one who pokes her with a needle every night to give her fluids. Maybe that has something to do with the way she ignores me. Every morning (and often in the middle of the night) she cries and cries for Terry. As soon as he sits down, there she is, ready to settle into his lap. Here’s a picture of them working on an order from Gardeners Supply.

Della sits with her head on Terry's knee while he makes notations in the Gardeners Supply catalog

Forensic Ecology

No pictures this week. Today was as dreary as it could be. We had some good rain, and I am still grateful for every drop that falls. Our water table can use the recharge. It’s nice to have a rainy day when you have nowhere to go. I sat at my desk most of the day (after making waffles for breakfast) writing and drinking ginger tea.

I went to a McHenry County Conservation District (MCCD) workshop yesterday called “Forensic Ecology.” The purpose of the training was to teach us how to research a piece of land from the original Illinois land survey in 1837. We also got a fair amount of pre-European settlement history. One of our instructors, Ginevra, gave us the history from the Silurian 500,000 million years ago when Illinois was a shallow inland sea to the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier 10,000 years ago. She connected this extremely early history with our soil types and topography.

Our guest speaker for the morning, John, was one of the men who does a lot of restoration work for MCCD. He told us about dredging a pond at Rush Creek in Harvard. Not surprisingly, the end of the pond next to the gravel pit was gravel. On the other end, though, he was digging in blue clay. He started hitting solid objects. They turned out to be spruce trees with the needles still on the branches. He worked carefully to get a big chunk of trunk out intact. He sent a sample for carbon dating. The results showed that the wood was 14,700 years old! The trees must have gone down in a huge flood that buried them in sediment and, in the absence of oxygen, preserved them forever. Our other instructor, Gail, rummaged in a back room and brought the log out. I got to see it with my own eyes and touch it with my own hands. 14,700 years!

Gail brought a collection of Native American artifacts that she had found on her family’s farm while she was growing up. Through her work on some historic restorations, she got to know some archeologists. She was able to get approximate dates for the tools she had found. She passed around a hand ax that was 3000 years old. I held it in my hand too, feeling a peculiar sense of connection to the other hands that held that ax so long ago. We passed around a scraper and a point (a.k.a. arrowhead) from 1000 years ago. Yes, indeed, if you don’t think our ancestors were smart and strong, you go out and try to kill a deer with a rock.

Gail took us through recorded history, explaining various sources of information. Lots of court records are digitized and available online. During lunch, I was able to look up the survey record of our farm. It was surveyed sometime between July 7 and July 10, 1837. Part of the area was “land thinly covered with bur oak timber. Soil good and fit for cultivation.” Much of it, though, was “land swampy prairies and unfit for cultivation.”

And then came John Johnstone, the father of modern drain tiles. By the 1850’s swamps were being drained like crazy, with ever more mechanized means of digging the trenches. Before it was all over, 800,000,000 feet of drain tile was installed in Illinois, and we’ve got some on our land. I have seen the pipe draining into the Piscasaw Creek.

In the afternoon, Ginevra took us through some sites to access GIS databases. The technology has come a long way since I was in graduate school. Lots of maps are available for free. I can hardly wait to start poking around.

Winter Storm Saturn

I had an even better visit from the Goddess of Unexpected Free Time today. She called my cell phone at 4:23 a.m. to tell me the college was closed. I went back to bed, but didn't fall asleep for a long time. I must have dozed off, though, because one minute it was 5:30 and next it was 6:45. Goodness! The day was half over.
I had a leisurely morning. I unpacked my new laptop and tried to configure it. As with all new systems, it will ruin my life for awhile. It opens up to a screen that looks like an iPad. I have no idea how to deal with it. As I was putzing with it, it suddenly popped up with the more familiar Windows screen. It was a relief, but I have no idea how to get to it intentionally. I'll figure it out.
I worked on my memoirs for an hour after breakfast while sipping on my second cup of tea. It was even harder to talk myself into exercising today than usual. I did it and am a better person for it. By 11:00, I was showered and ready to sit down to some real work, namely recording some videos on Mendelian genetics for my blended class. That took up the rest of my day.
The snow is still coming down right lively. We have more than 6" by now, I'm sure. Here's the view of the fifth oak that I took in the early afternoon.

The fifth oak in the snow

Kenosha, Knishes

Jane and I took a day trip to Kenosha, WI for the first time in over two years on Saturday. We’ve been shopping the outlet malls up there for over 25 years. The original outlet mall, which really was outlet stores with good bargains, is long gone. I still have the navy cardigan sweater I got for $5. Oh, the good old days. It’s been several (probably many) years since the new Pleasant Prairie Premium Outlet Mall opened. The “premium” part is a hint that these stores are not outlets at all. Most of the merchandise was not bargain priced, although we did occasionally find some good deals. We still went there to look around after we were done at the original outlet mall. We always stopped at the Gourmet Chef to check out the latest gadgets. Sometimes we found good deals on shoes at Timberland.

As time passed, one store after another vacated the original outlet mall until nothing was left.  Winona Knits and Socks Galore closed forever; Jockey, Eddie Bauer, and Corningware/Corelle/Revere moved to the new mall. The building was torn down and replaced with an automall.

Because it had been so long since our last trip, we didn’t know what to expect. The last time we were up Timberland was having their going-out-of-business sale. The older part of Pleasant Prairie was nearly a ghost town. Gourmet Chef was gone. Lots of storefronts were empty with promises of some store “coming soon.” I wonder.  We stopped at Jockey, where undergarments were get 40% off on two or more. We found some fun colors and bought two packages each, as if either of us needed more underwear. I went to Corelle to replace a serving bowl that broke. I got suckered into buying a set because the bowl I needed was $7, but I could get two bowls like that plus a larger bowl for $15. We went to Coldwater Creek and Eddie Bauer, but did not find anything appropriate to our age in either place. I will be so happy when fashion returns to pants that come to the waist as God intended.

Our other favorite stop in Kenosha was the Jockey factory, which often had really tremendously discounted factory seconds in the days when they actually made clothing. Production has gone overseas long since. Jane did some research before our trip and discovered that the factory store had moved downtown, giving up all pretense of being a factory at all. The website promised that they had tried to keep the same ambience by having a backroom of discounted items.

Jockey store in downtown Kenosha

We had never been to downtown Kenosha before. The prices at the Jockey store were the same as at the outlet mall. There wasn’t anything of interest in the back room. It’s a nice store in a renovated historic building. I wish them well.

Trolley Dogs entrance

We had lunch at Trolley Dogs across the street. An older man (well, probably my age) was working the front while wearing a hot dog hat. While he waited on the couple ahead of us, he quickly made a dog out of a pink balloon for a little girl in her mother’s arms. When it was my turn, I ordered a Chicago-style hot dog for Jane with everything but tomatoes.

“We don’t have butt tomatoes,” the guy said.

“Ha.” I replied.

“I’m just trying to buy some time to reset my ketchup bottle,” he explained.

I noticed that he was stuffing a long shoelace into a red squeeze bottle. The shoelace had a knot in the end.

I finished our order with a chili cheese dog and two bottles of water.

“Onions?” he asked.

“Of course,” I replied.

“Hot peppers?”

“Yes, please!” I  never had anyone offer me hot peppers with my chili cheese dog. What a great idea! Meanwhile, Mr. Hotdog Hat asked the people behind me if they wanted ketchup and squirted the shoelace at them. Nice to see a guy who loves his job.

I had been puzzled by “wrapped in fries” on the menu. When the hot dogs came, they had two layers of wax paper. The fries were inside the first layer, wrapped around the wax paper in which the hot dog resided. The bun was cottony soft and had been squished by the fry wrapping process. I assumed that squished bread was part of the Trolley Dog mystique.

Fries (left) wrapped outside squished chili cheese dog (right) with most of  Cheese Whiz smeared all over the wax paper.

When we sat down at a booth to wait for our order, I noticed that the bench was pretty chilly. After visiting the restroom, I appreciated that the bench was warm compared to the toilet seat. The interior of Trolly Dogs was painted mustard yellow. A yellow and black trolley circled overhead on a suspended track.

Trolley on suspended track

My chili dog was tasty. It didn’t have much chili on it, and the cheese was processed. It was a mess as it was. Jane pointed out that if there had been any more chili it would have been impossible to eat. True that. I had onion breath the rest of the afternoon, and my fingers smelled strongly of chili dog.

On our way home, we stopped at the River Valley Ranch mushroom farm in Slades Corners. I thought I bought two pounds of cremini mushrooms for Hilda and three pounds of white mushrooms to split with Jane. When I got home, both bags were white mushrooms. How do these things happen? We were distressed that there were no homemade caramels by the checkout. When I asked, the salesgirl told me they were in the cooler. Jane found them and brought them up to me. They are the very best caramels in the whole world, even cold.

Mushroom on the side of the mushroom store

Rustic entrance of River Valley Ranch Mushroom Store

Hilda and I have talked forever about trying new recipes together. We are finally following through. Two weeks ago we made cinnamon swirl raisin bread from a recipe in Fine Cooking. Today it is potato, pastrami, and Gruyere knishes from Cook’s Country. I had my misgivings when I looked at the huge mound of stuffing that was supposed to go into the tiny ball of dough. 

Apparent mismatch between huge amount of stuffing (left) and tiny ball of dough to wrap it in (right)

The dough really did roll out to a 16”x16” square (the second one was more square-like than the first, which was rather more amoeboid), and the stuffing really did all fit in it. We brushed the dough with olive oil to make layers as we rolled the stuffing in it. 

Hilda brushes the dough with olive oil

Rolling the filling in the oiled dough

We measured off 2” lengths and separated them with dental floss (a trick to keep the sections round—a knife will make the bottom side flat). 

Cutting with dental floss (unflavored) 

We then pushed them down to 1” and they were ready to bake. I thought it would take all afternoon, but we were done in two hours, with an hour for resting the dough in the middle of that time. 

Pressing down the knishes to 1" height

The finished knish, which was delicious. It's about 3" across.

 Hilda looked out the window this afternoon to see three of the chickens in the snow. They must have flown there as there were no tracks up to them. I suspect something spooked them. I was worried that Nigella, who was on top of a pretty deep drift, would not be able to get out and might get frostbitten feet. After I took some pictures, I talked to her a bit. She didn't move. About the time I was thinking I should get my boots and go in after her, she fluttered back to the safety of the open ground.

Nigella (far left), Ingrid (upper left), and Ina (center) in the snow while others look on from the windbreak