Thanksgiving

We left Wednesday to go to my brother and sister-in-law’s house in Harbert for Thanksgiving. We stopped for lunch at the Shoreline Brewery in Michigan City. I had poutine for the first time. I’d seen it on TV. It is the Quebec version of cheese fries. The fries were covered in brown gravy heavily seasoned with black pepper, topped with moist and smokey pulled pork and melted cheese curds. The menu described it as a “small plate.” Ha! It was much more than I should have eaten, and I left about 1/3 of the fries on the plate.

After lunch we spent about 45 minutes at the outlet mall nearby, making a few small purchases. We drove up to Sawyer, MI to spend some time at the Sawyer Garden Center. Terry priced out their boughs and branches; Dad looked at their decorations; Hilda browsed the garden section, and I found some nice all-cloth hot mitts in the kitchen department. If you can’t find it at the Sawyer Garden Center, you can probably get along without it.

We got to Doug and Pam’s house about 4:00. Dad set to work assembling the holiday decorations he had made for the mantle in the great room.

The mantle decorations

Following drinks and hors d’oeuvres of aged goat cheese and baguette, Doug made spaghetti alla puttanesca for supper. I ate too much.

The next morning, Doug and Pam heated up three kinds of croissants from a nearby bakery—ham and cheese, chocolate, and almond. Pam cut each one in half so we could try more than one kind. Before it was over, I’d had half of each one, making it the third time I had overeaten in less than 24 hours. But that’s what the holidays are all about, isn’t it?

Doug and Pam taking the croissants from the oven

Doug built a fire in the small room next to the kitchen. Their newest cat, Mitsy, was fascinated by the flames. Pam said she hadn’t seen fire in that fireplace before.

Mitsy by the fire

Hilda warming herself with both fire and coffee

Terry and I went for a walk on the beach. We had to walk through a wooded area to get to Lake Michigan. This created an illusion that the day was calm. When we stepped from the shelter of the forest to the open sand, the wind hit me with a force that made my eyes water. Flakes of snow stung my face. Terry pointed to a large, dark object a short distance down the shore and said, “We’ll just walk as far as that tree and turn back.”

Terry walking down to the beach

I was surprised. Terry is usually less sensitive to the cold than I am, and I expected he would want to walk farther. It must have been the wind that bothered him. The lake was wild with large waves and white caps.

When we got to the large, dark object it turned out to be a huge piece of molded plastic, possibly a shipping container. Other than that, the beach seemed remarkably clean.

Doug and Pam spent the whole day in the kitchen. Terry and I watched football in the great room while Mom and Dad read in the room by the kitchen. Moose, the other cat, who weighs 22 pounds and is close to three feet long not including his tail, kept Hilda company on the couch. Moose truly looks like a wild animal. Domestic cats are just not normally that big.

Hilda with Moose

Moose with ottoman for size reference. Note that the ottoman comes to his shoulder.

Pam’s brother Bill joined us for supper in the late afternoon. At 5:00 the dinner buffet was ready. In addition to turkey, we had mashed root vegetables (potato, parsnip, rutabaga, and turnip), Brussels sprouts with lemon, horseradish, and pomegranate, cranberry and dried cherry compote, wild rice with mushrooms, and sausage with sauerkraut. I realize this last dish is unusual, but Doug made it for my dad, who is not all that fond of turkey. This did not stop Terry from having a sausage or me from eating sauerkraut. 

Pre-dinner snacks--crudites, marinated olives, deviled eggs, roasted almonds, shrimp dip, and crackers

The turkey

Terry, Hilda, and Bill (left to right) at the buffet

I fill my plate

Everyone at table

Doug made his traditional tarte Tatin (apple tart) for dessert. This was served with crème fraîche, vanilla gelato, and/or salted caramel gelato.  I opted for the salted caramel gelato, which I must say went exceptionally well with the apples.

And we ate too much.

In the morning, we went out to breakfast at a small restaurant near Doug and Pam’s house. We packed the car and headed home. I didn’t eat again until supper.

Saturday, Pat and Nancy came out to cut Christmas trees. The selection was not as good this year because some of the trees suffered damage in the extreme cold of last winter. We were able to find three nice ones nevertheless. Our tree is a concolor fir. The other two were Fraser firs.

Pat cuts a Fraser fir for their house

Nancy holds a concolor fir while Terry cuts it for us

We left the egg harvest for Pat and Nancy because they like to do that. They found 9 eggs in the nest boxes.

Nancy and Pat with the egg harvest

As Hilda was boiling spaghetti for supper, we were treated to a lovely sunset that got brighter before it got darker.

The fifth oak at sunset

So far today, we have brought our trees in and put them in their stands. We are waiting for them to dry off before we start decorating. We can’t tell if it rained a little or there was just some exceptionally dense fog last night. Either way, the trees got wet.

Stay tuned for photos of the decorated trees.

Country commuting

When one lives in the country, the fall commute is marked by getting stuck behind a grain truck going 45 mph, a combine going 25 mph, and/or a tractor pulling two grain wagons going 10 to 15 mph. If you think the most annoying is the slowest, you are wrong. It’s the combine. Combines are, on average, as wide as a 2-lane road and are obligated to drive down the middle to avoid knocking down every mailbox on the right side. And there you are, for miles and miles.

The harvest is nearly wrapped up now, which is a darned good thing. We had a dismal weekend of alternating mist and rain, but at least it was relatively warm. Whatever corn is left in the field is going to need some good sunny days before combining now. Winter returned mid-morning today.  I drove to work in a heavy rain at 47°. When I came home, it was 20° colder and in near-blizzard conditions. There’s a long stretch of Highway 14 near the college where the road construction crews have left a 12” drop-off at the edge of the road where the shoulder ought to be. I felt the car lose its purchase on the pavement at about 40 mph. I carefully lifted my foot off the accelerator and slowed to 35. The people behind me would just have to deal with it. I wasn’t going to break my axel sliding over the edge.

It took me a good hour to get home. Where there were trees or shrubs on the west side of the road, I could go up to 50 mph. Where the wind blew uninterrupted all the way from Iowa, we crept along. Here’s a picture of Maxon Rd.

The view through the windshield on my way home tonight

Needless to say, I’m right glad to be home tonight. Hopefully the wind and snow will stop in time for the plows to clean everything up before I have to go back to work tomorrow. Or it could get bad enough to cancel classes. It’s the place in between the two options that concerns me. Winter bites. And it’s only November.

The fifth oak in the storm

Early winter

It was 12 degrees F on our thermometer Saturday morning. My friend Kate would call this “balls cold,” which is one of those expressions that conveys meaning while not really bearing up to close etymological scrutiny. The whole world was covered with frost.



Frosty morning Saturday--the sparkly grass, sadly, does not show up in the photo

The water bowl in the chicken run was encrusted with ice. I took it in and put it in the laundry sink to defrost so I could clean it up for winter storage.

Frozen water bowl from the chicken run

It was a little warmer in the afternoon. I ventured out to the garden to harvest the last of the cabbages and Brussels sprouts. I left the Brussels sprouts in the garage and brought the cabbage into the kitchen. I left them at room temperature overnight so I could assess possible frost damage. I put them on a tray in case they turned to swill as they thawed. This morning I started peeling off leaves. After several layers, I cut one in half. Frozen and ruined to the core. It wasn’t a crisis. We’re not short of cabbage. I’m glad to have done the experiment. Cabbage can tolerate upper 20’s but not low teens. Now we know.

The Brussels sprouts, if ruined, would be a tragic loss, as we were counting on them for Thanksgiving. Hilda reported that they looked fine. I suggested she cook some up, just to be sure. She brought me one to try, and we agreed that they had not been damaged. Now we know that too

We woke Sunday morning to about an inch and a half of snow with more coming down. It was one of those beautiful fluffy snows with little wind. It looked like it was snowing in slow motion.

 

First measurable snow on the gauge

The fifth oak in the snow

 

I like to put our jack-o-lanterns out where I can see them. They are getting old and wrinkled, like all of us, but they still look cheerful.



Jack-o-lanterns in the snow

It was Hilda’s day for chicken chores. She was the lucky one to see the hens’ first experience with snow. They didn’t like it. She reported that they sat on top of the windbreak and would not come down even for their scratch grain treats. They had gotten bolder by 10:00 when I put on my boots and gave them some Delicata squash seeds and the carrot peelings from my lunch preparations.

We’re pretty sure everyone is laying now. Last week we had a day with two white eggs, confirming that both Gracie and Nadia are producing. We had three green eggs Sunday, which means that all the Araucana are laying. They certainly took their time!
And if Saturday was balls cold, today was double balls cold. It was 6 degrees when I got up and had only gotten to 7.2 degrees when I went out to do the chicken chores. Gracie was huddled in a nest box. I'm a little worried about her. She's so tiny. Time will tell if she will be able to take the cold.

Bonfire

We lost one of our better trees to emerald ash borer last year. With winter coming, Terry cut the tree down for firewood.

Trails of emerald ash borers under the bark of our green ash tree

The tree on the ground

This green ash was about 20” in diameter, so I was amazed to find that it was only 30 years old. Some of the rings were nearly half an inch, which is a lot for a tree to grow in a year. When I commented that the last ring was narrow despite a year of good precipitation, Terry pointed out that the tree was already infested and beginning to die at that point.



Tree rings

In the process of trimming up the trunk and larger branches produced a considerable amount of brush. Hooray! We can have a fire!

Stacks of branches

Last Sunday, Pat, Nancy, and Jane came up for the burn. It wasn’t long before we had a huge fire going. Terry was right (not surprisingly) that ash dries quickly. Even though the tree died just this year, there was little evidence of moisture in the branched. Many trees have to age a year before they can be burned.

The start of the fire

The small branches burned fast and hot. We had to take frequent breaks to let the wood burn down until we could get close enough to feed it again, but it only took a few minutes for the branches to incinerate.



Terry by the fire

Pat feeds the fire

Hilda tosses a log

 

We were out by the fire from about 2:00 to 5:30. The last hour or so we were in the dark. I was fascinated watching the flames run along the branches. As the air currents passed by, the branches would flame or not. Here is a video of several stages of the fire after dark. At first, it was still raging. The next part shows the flames running on the branches, and finally, the dying embers just before we went in for supper.

 

Gracie's first egg

I got another phone call from my mother on Thursday afternoon. We had the first white egg. I had noticed earlier in the week that Gracie was doing the Squat of Maturity. I had left the coop door open for just a second while I moved the water and food out, and Gracie darted right out to the storage side. And there she squatted as if she was never going to move again. I rubbed her back with my left hand, since I had the feeder in my right, hoping to appease her. She was like a rock. I had to put the feeder down, pick her up, set her back where she belonged, and shut the door.

In spite of her delayed development with her near death experience from pasty butt on day 2 of her little life, she seems to have beaten Nadia to the egg punch. We are pretty sure the first—and the next three white eggs—belong to Gracie. She’s the one we see hanging around the nest boxes and begging in vain for action from us. Nadia remains aloof.

Gracie’s egg is very tiny and cute, although it doesn’t seem to be next to smaller-than-usual pullet eggs from the other varieties. I tried putting a quarter in for a size standard.

Gracie's first egg, left

All that was left in the garden at the beginning of this weekend was Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and kale. I left the kale plants in when I harvested the mature leaves to see if they would continue to grow. The leaves have gotten bigger, and I am going to continue that experiment. Hilda began the Brussels sprout harvest by picking the sprouts off the stalks and leaving the bitty ones at the top. Those kept growing also. We marked four of the better stalks to save for Thanksgiving as well as a couple for special friends. I went out yesterday to dig the rest. We grew a new variety called Nautic this year. They are taller than the other varieties and, best of all, have their sprouts more widely spaced and uniform in size. This is a marked improvement over the varieties that have a range of sizes from mongo on the bottom to buck-shot-sized at the top.

All that was left in the garden, from left to right, kale, Brussels sprouts, cabbages

Nautic Brussels sprouts marked for Thanksgiving with orange tape

I harvested two more of the 9-pound cabbages, one for Hilda and one to give away. I froze most of the one I harvested a few weeks ago and am working my way through another one.  There are only two left in the garden. I’m thinking of seeing how they fair in the root cellar.

The harvest--14 stalks of Brussels sprouts and two 9-pound cabbages

My nature news for today is that we have our own pair of red-tailed hawks now. Of the many things that make me feel old these days is telling my students my story about DDT and raptors when we talk about biological magnification in Ch. 47. Because DDT is fat-soluble and takes many years to break down, it accumulates in the fat deposits of animals. As a predator eats many animals from the level below it, it adds more DDT to its own fat stores. The hawks and eagles at the top of the food chain accumulated so much DDT that it interfered with their ability to put calcium in their eggshells. The eggs shattered when they attempted to incubate them. I see a red-tailed hawk nearly every day on my way into work, I tell my students, and I still get a little excited because I can remember a time when they were rare. And my students invariably look completely unimpressed. Oh well.

Red-tailed hawks are large birds. A presumably breeding pair hung out on the far side of the property all summer. I was in the kitchen one day when I say an enormous white thing (distance vision is not my strong suit) in a tree over by the prairie restoration. I grabbed the binoculars and went outside for a better look. I didn’t recognize it from the front. Only when it took off and showed me its red tail could I confirm its identity. A few days later, I was in the garden while two hawks called to each other continuously all afternoon. I couldn’t believe how long they kept it up. Most of the time now I only see one at a time. I thought maybe the other member of the pair had gone off for the winter, but I did see both of them yesterday. They do not seem interested in the chickens, which is a good thing. One often perches in the top of the fifth oak and looks at the field. I like to think they are keeping the mice and rabbits under control. Here is a sequence of shots I got Friday afternoon.

Looking for mice

Getting ready to fly after she spotted me

And we're off!

Into the wild gray yonder

Heinous choices

Would you rather grade the last four lab reports or clean the mold from behind the dressers?

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered the mold behind the dressers. I think it was when we were bringing the onions in. We had to mobilize every table we owned, including the craft table that was stowed next the row of four dressers that are lined up against an outside wall in the basement. I know, I know, what normal person needs four dressers? In my defense, only two of the dressers are truly mine, and two of the dressers are really fairly small lingerie chests. Two are historical items from the big house in Michigan. One dresser used to be my brother’s; one lingerie chest I don’t even remember. The latter is still full of my parents’ things including but not limited to basket making supplies and safety goggles. You never know when you might need them. Of the remaining three, I use about half the space for everyday items and the other half for long-term storage.

Back to our story. When I pulled out the table for the onions, I saw black irregular splotches on the white plastic. I swore, cleaned the table, and put the larger cleaning on my To Do list. Every week since I copied “Clean behind dressers” from the last weekend’s list to the next one. Until yesterday. Not only was my other choice grading lab papers, which I loathe, but also I woke up with a wicked sinus headache for the bazillionth time. Enough. Terry helped me move the dressers away from the wall. I put on an industrial dust mask that made me look and sound like Darth Vader.  

Luke, I am you father

The floor tiles were completely black. The cement wall had spots of mildew to a height of two to three feet. Okay, I thought, this won’t take long. It’s not a large area.

The project went according to Kay’s Law: Nothing is ever easy. (Kay was one of my office mates when I worked for the Girl Scouts.) Because that corner of the basement has no electrical outlets. I got the cordless hand vac to suck up all the dead bugs. I couldn’t figure out how to take it apart to dump it. After struggling with it for a few minutes, I left that part for Terry. Next, I contemplated my choices for what to use in the mop water. Since we’ve had a cleaning lady for the last two and a half years, our stash of cleaning supplies has dwindled. All I could find was an ancient small tub of OxyClean under the laundry sink. The plastic shattered on one side when I tried to lift it. It was a Big Mess. The only reason it wasn’t a Huge Big Mess was that most of the OxyClean had petrified into a lump on the bottom. Only the loose granules on the top spilled into the cabinet. I carefully tipped the container so the sound side was down and carried the remains to the kitchen. Then I got the hand vac and cleaned the cabinet and the trail of OxyClean that went from the cabinet to the kitchen.

Mop? Where is the mop? Don’t we still have a mop? Ah, behind the door in the store room. I knew where the mop bucket was. I broke off a hunk of OxyClean and put it in the bucket, once again scattering granules from here to Kingdom Come. With the OxyClean dissolved in hot water, I mopped for the first time. I replaced the OxyClean water with bleach water. I scrubbed the walls and floor where the mop didn’t reach. Oh, wait. Shouldn’t I be wearing rubber gloves? Those are under the kitchen sink. I wiped off the backs of the dressers. I mopped up the excess. I changed the bleach water about halfway through.

I was making good progress. I decided the best way to clean underneath the largest dresser was to take out the drawers and tip it forward. The top four drawers went well. The bottom drawer had mold in it. Nothing is ever easy. I unloaded the clothes. The drawer contained my good jeans (defined as not having garden stains on the knees), my jungle pants, and sentimental items such as a pair of scrubs from my respiratory therapy days, a stethoscope from that same era (you never know when you might need it), and my Hawaiian shirts. I put the scrubs and my pink flamingo shirt in the laundry. I don’t even know if the scrubs would still fit me. With a heavy heart, I threw away my original Wa-Ha Hawaiian shirt that has been with me since the early 80’s. It looked like it wouldn’t survive a trip through the washer. Sigh.

I bleached the drawer. I bleached inside the dresser. I bleached underneath the dresser, and under all the other dressers. I was relieved to find that only one dresser had internal mildew.

Two hours after I started on a project that I thought would take 30 minutes, I finished by stringing an extension cord for a fan to get everything in that corner nice and dry. Then I tackled the cobwebs and dust behind the headboard in the bedroom, as long as I had the respirator on.

By this time, I'd forgotten all about the OxyClean sitting on the kitchen counter. It was not a pleasant surprise. I broke up the lumps on a piece of newspaper. I inferred from my experience that long-term storage in plastic was not a good idea. I poured it all into a Mason jar. Then I swept up all the granules that had flown all over the kitchen.

Terry helped move the dressers back into a new and airier configuration. As he shoved a dresser back toward the wall, I said, “Stop! Leave it there!” where “there” was about 4 inches from the wall.

“Forever?” he asked.

“Forever.” I answered. At best, the increased circulation will prevent the mold from growing back. At least I will be able to easily look behind the dressers to see what’s going on.

I had a cup of tea and my lunch. After all that, the lab papers didn’t seem so bad. At least I got to sit down.

I pleased to report that I did not have a headache when I woke up this morning.

Welsummer eggs at last!

We got the first Welsummer egg on Thursday. While it was not as dark as I remembered from the photo in Hobby Farms that prompted me to order the breed, it is still beautiful. I would not, however, describe it as chocolate colored.

Welsummer egg, left; Buff Orpington egg, right

We had a nice trick or treat on Halloween. We got five eggs! Three were from Buff Orpingtons, one was from an Araucana (as far as we can tell, only Lizette is laying), and one from a Welsummer. Here is the group shot:

All of these eggs were laid on Halloween

We had five eggs yesterday as well. Only two today, though. I wonder where we'll be by next weekend. Soon I'll be hard boiling the excess to have for breakfast during the week! Can't wait!