Winter blues

I didn’t post last week because I had nothing to report. While the same is true of this week, I feel like I need to come up with something to keep my rhythm.

I’m in a funk. I’d really like to go into hibernation until spring comes. While Ground Hog Day officially marked the halfway point of winter, it seems that winter began that day and hasn’t let up since. It has been unseasonably cold. On top of that, I spent the better part of three days last week at a workshop with seven of my colleagues. It was productive, and I’m glad I went, but it put me behind. I had to spend ALL day Saturday and several hours today grading, which frankly makes me hate my life.

We haven’t had much new snow. From a shoveling standpoint, that’s a good thing. From the perspective of groundwater recharge, not so good. The old snow isn’t going anywhere. The path to the chicken coop is glaciated with packed snow and ice. We have to be very careful as we do our chores.

Icy path to the coop

 I went for a walk yesterday and today. It was good to be outside. The creek has frozen over completely.  I almost didn’t go today because it is 16° and there’s a wicked northwest wind blowing. I bundled up and went anyway, and I am a better person for it. The bright sunshine did me good. The girls were also very glad to get out after spending Thursday and Friday in the coop due to low temperatures and high winds. They don’t come out under those circumstances anyway, so we might as well leave the coop door shut. Interestingly, they are still laying well. I would have thought they’d be spending all their energy keeping warm.

The girls enjoying a relatively mild Saturday

Here is 34 seconds of chickens cooing peacefully.

Maybe something exciting will happen next week.

Thanksgiving Observed

I disagree with T. S. Eliot. April is not the cruelest month. February is. The days are cold, short, and gray. It seems as if spring will never come. The daily arrival of more seed catalogs feels like a mean-spirited joke.

Some years ago, I decided to fight back by having Thanksgiving Observed in February. I buy a turkey when they go on sale in November. When I’m tired of shifting the turkey around in the freezer to get at the food below it (typically in February), I invite some friends over and make a full Thanksgiving dinner.

I don’t find Thanksgiving dinner hard. Time consuming, yes. Hard, no. Any meal that revolves around a big piece of roasted meat is not hard. Meals that involve a lot of ingredients, measuring, mixing, fussing, and/or phyllo dough are hard. I started a week in advance by making a loaf of sourdough bread, cutting it into cubes, and drying it for the stuffing. I also defrosted the turkey. Perhaps my biggest intellectual breakthrough regarding Thanksgiving dinner was the discovery that it takes pretty much a whole week to defrost a turkey in the refrigerator. They say three days. HA! That’s a guarantee that you will find yourself the morning of with a big ol’ frozen block-o-bird. A fully defrosted turkey is the key to getting the darned thing done on the schedule described in the recipe.

I had quite a day Friday. I am going to miss a lecture in a couple of weeks because I am going to a conference. Thus, I taped the lecture Friday morning. I fooled around some with trying to insert some prepared videos from the textbook into my video. Not only was I not successful in doing so, I also screwed up the editing software somehow so that when I played back my video—which had taken two hours to edit, BTW—the quality was horrible. The original recording was still okay, praise be, but I had to edit it all over again, which was frustrating.

At the end of all that, it was nice to go to the kitchen and cook. I sautéed the onions, celery, mushrooms, thyme, sage, and rosemary for the stuffing. I made the pie crust and the cranberry sauce. I showed the cranberry sauce to Terry and told him that if I found it in the refrigerator Sunday morning, I was going to be mad. He assured me that he would remember. The back story to this is that years ago, Terry had wished through the entire Thanksgiving meal that there had been cranberry sauce, but had been too polite or too afraid to mention it. The cranberry sauce had been in the refrigerator the entire time.

Saturday morning, I baked the pumpkin pie and mixed up the stuffing. 

Pumpkin pie with pecans for treats at the end.

About noon, I got the turkey out of the refrigerator to warm up a little. Following Ina Garten’s recipe, I put salt and pepper in the cavity and stuffed it with garlic, onion, and thyme (Ina uses a lemon too, but I didn’t have one). I brushed the outside with butter and sprinkled it with more salt and pepper. How easy is that? Into the oven at 1:45. I roasted it back-side-up for the first hour and a half, then flipped it for the last half of the cooking until the breast meat was at 165°F. It was perfect.

A lovely turkey

Meanwhile, Hilda made mashed potatoes and corn casserole. I whipped the cream for the pumpkin pie. Jane came early to make gravy from the pan drippings, as I am gravy-challenged.

The rest of the guests arrived. We had a fabulous dinner, if I say so myself. We played one game of Farkle before dessert and rounds 12 through 5 of Mexican Train after. It was one of those magical evenings when we were all in just the right sort of good mood to relax and enjoy ourselves. We talked about books. I got to recite poetry (“archy interviews a pharaoh” by Don Marquis). There were frequent bursts of song and much, much laughter.

To give just one example, when it was Hilda’s turn at Mexican Train, she needed a seven. She looked at her tiles and said, “I don’t have one.”

Nancy, who was seated next to her, said, “Yes, you do.”

Hilda: “Cheater! You peeked!” And we all cracked up.

There were 8 of us at the table until 9:30 having a great time. Throughout it all, there was not a single electronic device in sight. Just saying.

And today the winter blues don’t seem so bad.

Winter Storm Linus

Winter Storm Linus rolled in early yesterday morning. The weather report put us under a winter storm warning until 2:00 p.m. when “the wind will pick up” and we would move on to a blizzard warning. Let me tell you that the wind was blowing plenty at 7:00 a.m., leaving us to wonder how bad it would get.

The view from the kitchen window during the storm

The drift building on the patio in the afternoon

The good news was that it was Sunday, and we could just hunker down and ride it out. Terry went out late in the morning to try snowblowing. He gave it up as a bad job. The wind was blowing the snow in as fast as he could remove it. More good news was that the northeast wind blew large areas of the driveway clear.

The snow had let up by 9:00 last night when the Super Bowl was over.  I was pretty sure I’d have to go to work today. I went to bed wondering how many days it would take for me to forget who won the game. I know for a fact that it won’t be long before I can’t even remember which teams played. In one sense, it was four hours of my life that I’ll never have back. In another sense, I like the excuse to eat Cheetos.

I woke up at 2:00. The sky was perfectly clear, and the moon shone brightly on the snow drifts. I was certain I’d have to go to work today. So certain that I hopped out of bed promptly when the alarm went off at 5:00, fully prepared to rush around so I could leave 15 minutes early in anticipation of bad roads. For a lark, I checked my cell phone.  There was a voice mail! The College was closed! If I’d stayed up one hour and 11 minutes later, I would have known the night before. No matter. I went back to bed and slept until 7:00. Seven o’clock! I didn’t know I had that much sleep in me.

The drift north of the garage, as tall as the base of the green house

Hoo-boy, it was cold this morning, 2°F when we got up. I waited until 10:00 before I bundled up to shovel snow. My fingertips were cold until I got going, but after that I was comfortable and almost too warm. I started by clearing the drift that was in front of the coop door so we could let the chickens out when it got warmer. Terry fired up the snowblower and started on the drifts in the driveway. I went down to the road to shovel the clumpy snow and salt mix that the plow had deposited there and look for the newspaper. I cleared all the snow and shoveled out the mailbox, but no paper was to be found.

Terry snow blowing this morning

I tidied up the front steps and the garage door where Terry couldn’t get the snow blower. After that I tackled the 3-foot drift on the patio. Now that was a lot of snow. No, I can’t explain why we never put the patio furniture away. I suspect it was some combination of Terry not thinking there was room in any one of our numerous outbuildings and the end-of-harvest frenzy before winter. (Old joke: What’s Irish and sits on the deck? Paddy O’Furniture.)

The patio first thing this morning. Note that the drift is as high as the table.

Immediately after I shoveled

An hour after I shoveled

Although there was more shoveling to do, I’d been at it two hours and feared that if I continued I’d hurt myself (if I hadn’t already). I ate lunch and had a shower. An hour after I’d come in, the patio was melting nicely in the sun even though the temperature was only 18°F. The wonderful thing about physically doing something like shoveling snow or mowing the grass is that you can see what you’ve done. So not like teaching.

In other news, the Holy Family Potato has sprouted. I think that I will plant it in a pot soon. I don’t think I will be able to wait until I can plant it in the ground. I hate to say it, but it looks a little like the Holy Family is sprouting devil horns.

Sprouts on the Holy Family Potato

Eagles and Barges

Yesterday, we packed up the whole family and met Jane in Sycamore for a fun adventure to Starved Rock. Our first adventure was to find where the seatbelts attached in the back seat of Jane’s car. Hilda had volunteered to sit in the middle, and the middle seatbelt clearly had to attach in two places. We had to get out the owner’s manual. The end of the belt hooked to a buckle that was buried in the middle of the seat behind the driver. I was concerned that I would have the buckle rubbing on my tailbone for the whole trip, but in fact I did not feel it at all.

Onward. We arrived at Starved Rock at 11:30 and proceeded directly to the lodge to try to beat the lunch rush. We were too late. Unable to seat us at a table for five in the main dining room for 20 minutes or more, the hostess suggested that we go to the lounge, which served food from the same menu. The lounge had an open table with six seats.

Hilda and I ordered the special, a roast beef sandwich with provolone and horseradish sauce on brioche. The beef was delicious. It had a rub on it that made it slightly sweet and barbeque-like. They were a little stingy with the horseradish sauce. I had the house-made potato chips. Hilda had sweet potato waffle fries. Jane had a turkey burger with chips. She reported that the turkey burger had spices mixed in with the meat which made it exceptionally tasty. Dad had a pork cutlet sandwich. Terry ordered the ham and potato soup with a side of fries. He found the soup too strongly flavored with the ham.  He didn’t like it very much. “And,” he quoted Woody Allen, “the portion is too small.”

We got one box for Hilda to take home our leftover fries, sweet potato fries, and chips. Even so, we ate too much.

Terry and I went out to the deck, where I saw the first eagle flying down the river valley. After a brief stop in the gift shop, we drove down to the visitors center. As I was looking at the fish tank, I heard Jane’s voice from the other side say, “I’m not dead, and I’m not stuck.”

My first thought was that Jane was stuck, but it turned out that she was reading a sign on the fish tank: “I’m not dead, and I’m not stuck. I just like hanging out in this log. I’m a flathead catfish.”

I took a closer look at what I thought was a mottled side branch of an upright piece of driftwood. It was most of the body of a fish, its tail resting on the bottom of the fish tank and its head stuck through a hole in the driftwood. I could see it breathing, but otherwise it was perfectly camouflaged.  I couldn’t think of a good way to get a picture.

I found only one small plaque explaining the geology of the area. Erosion from glacial melt. Nothing about the history before that.

Terry called me over to look at a display of the emerald ash borer. Neither of us has seen a specimen of this insect. It was smaller than we imagined. I thought it would be the size of a box elder bug, but it was about 2/3 of that. It fit easily on a penny with room all around.

We got back in the car and struggled with the seatbelts again, since we were going out on the highway.
“It’s like playing Twister,” Jane remarked from the front seat.

Terry noticed that the Kentucky coffee trees were still holding onto their pods. “The sycamores haven’t dropped their balls yet either,” he continued.

His phrasing and inflection struck Hilda and I as hilarious. We got such a fit of silent giggles in the back seat that we had to wipe our eyes.

We went back over the bridge and turned on the river road to go to the Illinois Waterway Visitors Center and Starved Rock Lock and Dam. A barge was just leaving as we got there. Another barge was waiting to enter the lock.

A barge leaving the lock just as we arrived

Unlike last year, there were eagles on Plum Island. I saw as many as four at once, and I think there might have been five or six total.

Four eagles--two at the top and two in the lower left

Periodically, the eagles took off and flew up and down the river. These are the best of the 40-some pictures I took.

One eagle in flight, two others in the trees at the right

A spotting scope inside the Visitors Center was on an eagle on the island. Here is a picture Jane took with her cell phone.

Jane's photo through the spotting scope

While we were eagle watching, the lock was filling with water so the next barge could enter. That took about 20 minutes. The barge was really 8 barges, two rows of three and one row of two. It took the second barge 50 minutes to get all the way through the lock. The highlights of those 50 minutes are in this 8 minute, 25 second video. It shows the lock gates opening, the barge coming in, the barge sinking as the water left the lock, the downstream lock gates opening, the pilot boat moving from the side of the barges to the middle, and the barge leaving the lock. The geese on the lawn next to the lock made a racket as the barge scared them off. I regret that I missed the horn that the pilot boat sounded when it started moving.

The signs on the far wall of the lock indicated that the lock was 600 feet long, as long as two football fields, and the barges took all of that space. The barges were held together by steel cables.

Steel cables holding the barges together

Note how high the barge is when it enters the lock.

The barge entering the lock with its sides several feet above the edge of the lock

And how low it was when it exited.

The barge leaving the lock with its sides several feet below the top of the lock

Jane pointed to a display about life jackets and told me I had to have her take my picture for my friend Pat, who worked for the Red Cross for many years.

Don't just pack it; wear your jacket!

I was chilled by the time the barge was on its way down the river. Nevertheless, we tried to find ice cream in Utica. The ice cream store that we loved last year was still closed for the season. (Last year we went on March 6, which was too late for eagles, but at least we got ice cream.) We stopped at another place that advertised ice cream (and wine and fudge) and sent Terry in to investigate. We were totally not going to undo the seatbelts just to check availability. He came back chewing.

“How’s the fudge?” I asked.

“It’s good! They had a whole plate of samples. No ice cream this time of year, though.”

Jane suggested we go to Culver’s in Sycamore, where we arrived an hour later. She pulled into the drive-up so we would again be spared the seatbelt ordeal. I hate drive-ups and rarely use them when left to my own devices. Thus, I was surprised to see a drive-up trash can (that is, having the opening off to the side and extended so one could reach it from the driver’s window) before the order window. I suppose those who use drive-ups routinely have to throw away the garbage from their previous meal before they get their next one. What a way to live. As Jane drove past the trash to the speaker, Hilda said, “I was ready to order at the garbage can.”

“Hello! Hello!” I said. And we had another giggling fit. Hilda doesn’t use drive-ups much either.

Jane’s cone came in a dish, but we didn’t like to send it back. Instead, she pulled over for a few minutes so she could have a free hand for her spoon.

Jane dropped us off at our car in the Jewel parking lot. We were home before dark and before Winter Storm Linus had dropped the first flakes of snow. More on that later. We had a very fun day.