Christmas week

 So what's with me writing and then stopping for almost a whole week? 

We were busy enjoying Christmas week and working on the wood project (as I have no dubbed it) 

That wood project ... it wears me out each and every time we do it. It's so sad. The pandemic and being home all the time has made me weak, I think. 

When we weren't working on the wood project, we were just home. Not doing anything special.  We had a day or two where it was cold out and not warm enough to do much outside.  We hunkered down and watched movies. 

My son and husband hefting and moving around one of the huge wood cuts. 

The pile when all that was left was the big chunks. 

Watching the boys work, from a different angle.

The pile is slowly going down. Two hours at a time, give or take. I was thinking about this project.  Even if we are working on it a few or three hours at a time, it will still take us a few months to work on it. Maybe.  It will be a weekend project since we can't work on it during the day. 

I spotted another face in the wood. 

The sunset on Christmas Eve. Beautiful

Christmas Day and dinner were quiet. The meal was more simple, as in not as many sides. I decided to focus on the turkey and the standard trimmings. My son pointed out that I forgot the corn. Oh well. 

It was a beautiful bird and browned perfectly. 

Afterwards my son asked me if we could have *real* snow cones since we got a tote full of clean snow. When the snow moved through our area it filled a huge tote I had left on the deck.  Lovely clean snow.  I made some simple syrups and used kool aid for flavoring. I haven't had a snow cone in years.  It was good!

A couple photos from when I thought I'd be *artsy.

Icicles on my roof line. The day before I took this photo I saw a gal on television who makes her bread and butter by doing icicle photography.  I never thought of it, but, yeah, icicles up close are really pretty!

I call this one "Snow shovel forgotten by the tree after serving its purpose." Ha! I'm hilarious! 

On the crafting front, I haven't done as much as I would have hoped. For various reasons. Mostly I was just too tired to think of doing anything. 

I recently started a sock with 1 x 1 ribbing. I haven't been doing much of the driving so I thought I'd take advantage and have a vanilla sock going.  I've mostly worked on it while watching television. Go fiure. 

I'm making very slow progress on my cross stitch project. This is a cross stitch pattern put out by the Fat Quarter Shop.  I'm actually further along than this photo, but I've got the project tucked away right now.  I keep telling myself "slow and steady." 

One thing I did start and I'm glad to have started was a pair of dishtowels on my loom. 

I haven't woven anything in ages. I wanted to get something going way back in March, but life got crazy with the pandemic and "safer-at-home" stuff. Not to mention baby chicks. 

Weekend shenanigans

 It's that time of year where my hubby takes vacation time, and we do all the things!  Well, it's sort of like that. 

Friday was both our last day of work before vacation.  Him and I have all next week off.  My son still has to go to school Monday and Tuesday. Ha ha! 

Saturday I slept in a bit. I had no idea my body needed that much rest. I think I slept for 10 hours. 

After some coffee and a quick something to eat, we started working on the stack of fire wood.

This photo was taken when we were done yesterday.  This afternoon my husband and son went out and cut up more and got stuff ready for tomorrow. 

I'm going to share photos from when we were working.  Nothing much to really explain here.  My husband cut up all the pieces for the log splitter.  I was hauling the pieces over to him. My son was grabbing up the cut pieces and loading them into the trailer.  

My son coming back for another bundle. 

I have to be a bit sneaky about taking photos.  My son HATES having his photo taken, but I know he will appreciate this when he's older.  He better. 

This was part of the pile of cut wood that was waiting to be split. We saved the heaviest for last.  Uff da! It was all so heavy. 

Cutting up one of the bigger pieces. 

I found an interesting pattern in one of the cut pieces.  I think it looks like the fear mask, from the movie. 

We filled the trailer up three times and drove it over to where we are building the holz hausens. 

We opted to started a second one, rather than continuing on the first one. If/when we ever get snow, no one will have to clear out the area for the new one to be started. Hooray for forward thinking! 

Aren't they a cute pair?

Today the weather was decent, still. The temperature wasn't too low either. 

So we decided to do another overdue project. 

Can you guess? 

What do we use this pot for? 

Need another hint? 

Okay. What is this? 

Did you guess a chicken plucker? 

Yup ... It was time to butcher these guys. 

These are the last of the roosters we hatched out and raised up. 

Well, the whole process went incredibly fast.  No more than two hours, including set up and clean up. We butchered 10 birds.

They turned out beautifully. If freshly processed birds can be called that. This bird is fresh from the plucker and before my husband did the last bits that need doing. 

Since we wrapped that up so early in the morning, I took the time to do a quick clean around the house. Then worked on dinner.  We had Ka Bobs. It's been a while since we had them.

I forgot to take a photo of them, but I did take a photo (or three) of Furby.  She was in the kitchen with me, keeping me company.  She's so funny, sometimes, when I try taking a photo of her at her level.  Half the time she's so busy trying to see what is going on. 

"What's going on?"

"Hold on, let me see you with my good eye."

"I still have no idea what's going on."

This afternoon I gave the big girls and roos a bit of a treat. I had some bok choy from a food box I paid for.  I forgot about the bok choy and it froze.  I had it stored in a cooler out in the garage. 

The birds seems to like it. 

Beautiful Monday morning

Woke up to a cold temps this morning.  

You know what that means? 

It's going to be a *beautiful* day. 

The gauge said it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside (-12 C). Fortunately it was 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 C) in the house.  I'm thinking my husband must have feed the wood stove at some point in the night. 

Gorgeous sunrise. This was sometime after 7 a.m., when I was out doing an early run on the farm chores. 

Thor, the senior male bunny, wasn't too happy with the sudden drop in temperature.  He came running to me, in his hutch, and I could tell he wanted to be anywhere else but outside. 

Shadow and Feffer were snuggled up to each other. 

All the chickens and roos were very happy to see me bringing homemade fermented feed in early. 

What a beautiful blue sky!

And since I was outside I got a photo of our holz housen 

Other than it being seasonably cold, nothing remarkable happened.  I worked for pay. We are hoping to get the paper done on Friday and I'm working on stuff early, and was doing putzy paperwork stuff. Nothing very exciting. 

I was listening to gardening/homesteady youtube videos in the background.  This weekend I was going through the photo roll on my phone, and seeing all the pretty photos I had taken of the garden last year. As a result, I'm starting to think of gardening stuff already. I went over to the almanac website to see when it's recommended to start planting seeds indoors.  Late March and early April.  I remember that I started some stuff on the early side last year, since I was trying to get a feel for things, but I didn't think it was *that* early. 

In any case, I've already requested a bunch of seed catalogs, so I can see if there's anything exotic I may want to try out. I don't anticipate needing to buy a lot of seeds for the veggie garden this next year. 

Flowers from last year. *sigh* 

The Golden Hour. 

I need to remember where I put my real camera.  So next year I can take kick-butt photos. 

I feel like a "real" gardener now

Today was an exciting day for me.

Why, you might ask? 

Well ... let me tell you. 

My husband bought me a greenhouse. 

Yup.  It's true.  He did!

And today we set it up. 

We put it together and brought it out to the front yard. I orginally thought that would be a great spot for it.  It would be sort of close by in case we needed to run a cord out to it or something.  Then we decided we really wanted it over in the garden area.  So we both went into side it and lifted it up by the shelves and carried it like over. 

Here it is, in all it's glory.

I brought everything out that I have started and set it in there.  I'm fairly confident that everything appreciated being out in the actual sun. I still have to bring everything back in tonite. I had snow storm warning alerts popping up on my phone all day.  Starting sometime tomorrow my area could get anywhere from 0-24 inches of snow. Lovely. 

Let me take you on a quick tour of the inside.

When you walk in and look to the right

And then when you look to the left.

And that's pretty much it. 

Next weekend I think I will start up more seeds.  I can't think of which ones, off the top of my head.  I am also thinking I may start my pea seeds in the garden. I'm trying to follow the recommendation of the Old Farmer's Almanac. The next few weeks could be pretty busy for me.  Not that life hasn't been busy, but now I've got a new element to work with. 

So what else happened today?  Hmmm ... 

Well, this morning one of the chicks earned himself/herself some time at the spa.  That's what I call it when they have poopy butt. 

The chick seemed a little pouty that I was daring to get it's little booty wet. 

It couldn't believe it was sitting in a cup of nice, warm water. 

It was going to give me a piece of it's mind once it woke up from it's nap. 

We did some more stuff out in the yard.  Pine needles and leaf mulch was applied to the raspberries.  

More chicken manure was added to the garden. Not as much as we would have liked because the manure pile were were eyeing was still too fresh.  There were lots of insects in it.  I grabbed some scratch and enticed some of the hens over so the could enjoy the feast.  

It didn't work quite like I thought it would. The rooster came over and tried to take credit for the treats and finding the insects.  The hens weren't paying much attention to him.  Pontiac, our oldest hen, recognized the word "Treat!" and came over as fast as she could. 

Remember when I said that I hoped the hens would find a different spot to take dirt baths?  They did.  

Unfortunately it isn't a good spot, so we will have to think of a permanent solution to keep them out of the spot. 

Right next to the shed, really? 

They managed to clear a LOT in just a few hours. And where does all that dirt go? 

I had the idea that it might be fun to put Thor and Loki out in the garden. For a while they happily played in the garden bed.  Thor ran around, sniffed everything and dug plenty of holes.  Loki checked out a bunch of different spots and ran around everywhere.

Miss Loki, sitting up so she could see better. 

We could tell how happy they were to just run around and around.  After a while Thor just started flopping onto his back. Run around and then flop.  Loki was more dainty about everything.  No digging for her!

My husband had the great idea that we should have an early "dinner" of hot dogs cooked over a fire.  My son and I enjoyed s'mores. 

The funny thing about these s'mores is the marshmallows were pretty stale.  They still tasted pretty good, however. 

So now we have snow to look forward to.  And cooler temps. Boo!

Photo challenge day 11 - "Vacation."  Well, we haven't been on vacation in at least a year.  We do the 'staycations' since we have the chickens. 

Two years ago we spent a lot of time on the Minong Flowage. Picnics on the water are a pretty nice thing. 

If I don't see you tomorrow, have a Blessed Easter, if you celebrate.