YAs current advent calendar (yes, she still gets an advent calendar even at the age of 30) is something I put together several years ago – decorated envelopes that are clipped onto greenery with cute teeny clothes hangers across the dining room windows. Gift cards and the kinds of sour candy that she likes.
As you know, that’s not the only advent fun we have around here – there are advent calendars of all kinds out there now, making it easy to indulge. You know I’m not doing the wine anymore and the shortbread bit the dust, the gingerbread was awful. The cat and the dog weren’t remotely interested in theirs. Even a high end chocolate one a few years ago wasn’t to our taste. But that doesn’t stop us from checking stuff out. This year we have:
A small post-it sized pad of simple pictures that I can color.
My color-by-number app has a different advent picture each day
Advent jigsaw puzzle (small box of 42 pieces per day)
Milk chocolate
Cheese
Day One of Advent Jigsaw Puzzle
As if we can’t throw ourselves into this kind of thing enough on our own, we have friends who are now abetting us. One friend sent me an online advent calendar by Jacquie Lawson (an online card creator). It is quite elaborate and fun. Another friend gave us a World of Chocolate (this is different from the little milk chocolate calendar I mentioned above). Neither YA nor I are big dark chocolate fans, so we’ll have to see how this plays out. The biggest surprise this year was a delivery from a couple we know of a Bonne Maman jams/jellies calendar. For the first day I took a picture (the header photo) and sent it to my friends. Wonderful.
So, yes, we’re a little crazy here but it’s a fun, low-key way to enjoy the season. And we’re pretty good at jettisoning the non-fun stuff if needed!
On apple picking day, as we put our peck and a half on the scale at the paying shed, it just didn’t look like enough apples. It’s the amount we’ve gotten for the last couple of years; we looked at each other and had the same thought – we need more. Since I was already hobbling around with the big brace on my knee, we bought a pre-picked bag and added it to the scale. Three quarters were Connell Red (my favorites) and the last quarter were Honeycrisp (YA’s favorite). I do like the Honeycrisp and I wish it were my favorite since it’s a home-grown Minnesota apple. But the Connell Red was introduced in Wisconsin and is said to be the “offspring” of the Fireside which IS a Minnesota apple. Close enough for me.
Apple crisp is a staple for us during the fall. My recipe is based one I found in the Apple Cookbook that I bought decades ago from the Afton Apple Orchard. We add cinnamon to the apples and we use two times the topping that the recipe calls for. In fact, I usually make several batches of the topping all at once and put the extra in the fridge. That way making an apple crisp is really just a matter of cutting up the apples.
Our other favorite is an Apple Manchego Salad. I had this at the Loring Café years ago and chef was gracious enough to give me the recipe. (I’ve since found the exact same recipe online so I don’t think I’m as special as the chef made me feel at the time!) It’s pretty simple. 3-4 apples (depending on size) cut into matchsticks. Then 4-5 ounces of manchego cheese, also cut into matchsticks. I use the mandoline for this, making it quite a fast salad but you can certainly chop by hand if you need. About ¼ cup of chives, chopped fairly finely. A splash of lemon juice (no more than a teaspoon), about three tablespoons of olive oil, salt and pepper. Done. I made this salad at least three times this fall and despite it saying “8 servings”, YA and I have made it disappear in less than 24 hours each time. Then there are the hand pies, which I think I promised I wouldn’t talk about too much. Made them twice this year.
Yesterday I decided it was time to use up the last 7 apples that have been stored on the back porch. Since I had some crisp topping left, I made an apple crisp and then with the very last two apples, I made a teeny French apple cake, using my 6” springform pan (which I never get to use enough). This is the first time I’ve tried the cake recipes – we’ll see if YA likes it – she gets back later today from her latest trip.
Of course, crisp apples with peanut butter slathered on them are the premiere snack at this time of year!
Any fall favorites that you’ll miss until next year?
I swear I’m not doing yet another blog about hand pies, despite the header photo.
A discovery was made a couple of weeks ago that if I ask Alexa to play “You Butter My Bread” by the Divers, I will get a nice mix of songs that remind me of TLGMS. Some of the songs are actually TLGMS favorites.
Yesterday morning, while I was making something that I’ve promised I won’t mention, I made my request and one of the songs that Alexa coughed up was “Canned Goods” by Greg Brown. You all know I adore this song; this morning, looking out a the slight dusting of snow on the neighbor’s roof, I realized that it’s official that summer is over.
So going into fall/winter, this is what I’ve put up this year: strawberry jam, raspberry jam, pesto, applesauce, tomato sauce, basil/oil cubes, chive/oil cubes, mint/lime juice cubes, strawberries, raspberries and grapes. Somehow it doesn’t seem like I’m keeping up with Greg Brown’s grandmother!
This week I was defeated by cheap electronics that think they’re smarter than me.
We have one of those little fake fires in the college show. The bowl with the fan, and the orange lights, and the silk. I have a 12 volt battery connected to a power inverter (which takes 12 volts and makes it 120 volts) and the fake fire is plugged into that. It is all tucked under a table and the fire sits on top and it worked fine until one of the actors accidentally bashed the table into a wall. And then the power inverter didn’t work anymore. Which is disappointing to me, it’s all solid state, there’s no fuse inside because I took it apart to look, but all it does is give me a red “fault” light and it doesn’t do anything else. I went to the local electronic store and picked up a really cheap inverter and a little bit better one. Apparently the old one didn’t care if I only had 11.5 volts, it would still power the fire. The new ones want 13 volts and if they don’t have it, they don’t output anything except a loud annoying beeping. I tried a couple batteries wired together in parallel, I tried different batteries, and I tried other various assemblies without success. Between the two shows on Thursday I went over to the auto department of the College. They always look at me funny when I walk in with my arms full of whatever it is I’m working on for a show. They probably think it’s kind of fun and I think they do enjoy helping, but they still look at me funny. They suggested a jump pack, like they use to jumpstart your car these days. They even let me borrow one for the afternoon and that worked great. I’ve got one at home, it just never even dawned on me to try that. I took that in for the last couple shows.
Cold weather coming for a few days. I think the snow they predicted is out of the forecast now. Still, I ran around Friday afternoon like there was a blizzard coming. I had to tell myself to just calm down. I drained all the hoses, put them away, took off the outside faucet I use for watering chickens. I parked all the tractors, the lawn mower, the gator, and the four wheeler in the shed. I finished power washing the deck and retaining wall. Both are in the shade and on the north side of the house so they get a lot of mildew and lichen on them. It sure looks nice when cleaned. One of those things you don’t realize how dirty it’s gotten. Once done, I drained that hose, and put the power washer in the heated shop.
My goodness! How did it get so grungy and we didn’t notice??
Driving into school in the mornings, the sun is at just the right spot now, it hits that gap in the visor.
Achoo!
Another week it will have changed enough it won’t be a problem again. It sure does get dark early now. I like standard time; it just fits my body’s circadian rhythm better. Daughter is very upset it gets dark so early.
I think all the deer in a 20 mile radius have moved to my corn fields. Just about all the other corn around here has been harvested and most fields are dug up for winter. I don’t want to push the guys; they’ll get here when they get here to harvest mine. I just hope the deer leave me some corn. If you come down the driveway an hour after sunset, there are deer ALL OVER. Most coming out of the cornfield with an ear of corn in their mouth. Stupid deer.
In one of the farm magazines, there was an article about an all-black chicken called an ‘Ayam Cemani’. They really are ALL black: Comb, skin, bones and even the meat is black. Their eggs are ivory colored.
(Photo courtesy ‘Chickenscratchpoultry.com’)
Research shows these chicks can cost anywhere from $37 to $70 each. And I thought $5 was an expensive chick. The article I read says the chicken is “small, aloof, and only lays one or two eggs / week.” I won’t be getting any. That would be the first one eaten by a coyote.
DOES SUNLIGHT MAKE YOU SNEEZE? ARE YOU A BIG SNEEZER OR A DAINTY SNEEZER?
Our son and daughter loved listening to Rabbit Ears productions of children’s stories narrated by famous actors accompanied by wonderful musicians. One of their favorites was a story about Paul Bunyon narrated by Jonathan Winters with music by Leo Kottke. It was funny to hear Paul Bunyan talk about the assignment he got from the president to clear off all the trees from North Dakota. We could certainly relate, as we had a dearth of trees in our region.
Husband has really enjoyed walking the dog and seeing all the crimson and scarlet maple leaves in the neighborhood. We didn’t have these kind of maples in ND. He said the last time he lived in a place that had maples like this was 46 years ago in Madison, WI. The trees in Dickinson were mainly Green Ash and Cottonwoods. Their leaves were pretty blah in the fall.
We have a maple and an oak in the our front boulevard. We also have a Birch in the backyard, along with a Blue Spruce and a Flowering Crab. There are also all sorts of Arbor Vitae. We are well set for trees and bushes. The header photo is a tree across the street from us
What trees do you have in your yard? Any favorite Jonathan Winter or Leo Kottke creations?
*I used artificial intelligence to give me title suggestions because I had nothing. I didn’t like its ideas, but it spurred me to this one.
Summer padawan and his girlfriend found a hen with baby chicks. Don’t know where she’d been hiding them. That’s the header photo. Kelly and the kids rounded them up and got them in a side pen.
It was a little chilly this week. We had 27 degree’s on Friday AM. I did finally turned on the heat in the house- meaning I turned on the circuit breakers, I haven’t turned UP the heat yet. (Well, we turned on one baseboard heater to burn off the dust and that set off the smoke alarms, much to daughter and Luna’s dismay…) I unhooked the hose on the house faucet. And Bailey even slept in her sink with the blankets. I don’t know, it’s just something she’s always done.
Honestly, she’s not as pitiful as she looks here.
It’s cold in my theater shop; But that just means I have to work harder. Glad I’m wearing sleeves a few mornings.
I didn’t get much of anything done this week at the theater or the farm because it felt like I had a lot of meetings every day. I became chairman of another board, but that’s just a nominating committee and it’ll be quick and easy.
I got the three broken bolts drilled out and re-tapped for the muffler on the 630.
Drilled out the old bolts, and cut new threads using this tap.
Now I’m just waiting for the stud bolts that I had to order. And I got a new bolt for the tongue on the wagon that I fixed. The replacement bolt was a little bit different and I needed to drill a hole in it to put in a cotter pin so that the nut doesn’t work loose and come out causing the tongue to fall off, which would be a whole big deal.
Marks on the head of the bolt tell you the hardness of the bolt. If it’s plain it’s soft steel, grade 3. And this is all different for metric, I’m just talking American bolts, SAE. (Society of Automotive Engineers also called US Standard or imperial). Three marks mean it’s a grade 5 and six marks mean it’s a grade 8. A grade three bolt will bend whereas the five and eight will snap and break. There again, information you didn’t know you needed to know.
Bolt markings
I had to re-sharpen the drill bit a couple of times to get this hole drilled through this grade 8 bolt.
Drilling a hole for a cotter pin.
This is what it looks like when finished.
Took the dogs to the vet. Humphrey, being 10 years old and having a sore leg, has been on aspirin for a year and he needed a checkup before they’d give him more aspirin. And all three needed all the shots. And then I took the trailer to save more big money, and bought thirty, 20’ lengths of rebar for the concrete. They make fiberglass rebar now, it’s cheaper and lighter.
In preparation for the concrete, I have finished excavating dirt so that I can put the gravel down as the base. I was able to use the tractor loader to excavate most of the dirt. Then shoveled along the wall and existing concrete. I did have to get the pick out for a couple spots. I bought this at an auction a few years ago. Glad to have it, and it worked great.
There was rain in the forecast for next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday (Which turned into Tuesday, Wednesday and is now just Tuesday) depending on who you listen to. I am planning concrete Tuesday. The biggest portion would be inside so that’s not an issue but the whole reason I started this was the two outside slabs and too much rain is an issue for them. I’m trying to decide if I can somehow put a tarp over this or I should just reschedule for another day. And I don’t want to do that. I’m stressed about this and I have help lined up for that day, so I just need to get it done.
Although maybe by the time you read this the forecast will have changed, that’s what I’m counting on.
I’ve rented a plate compactor for the weekend to get the gravel base compacted prior to the concrete. I’m excited and scared about all this. Trying to think of all the little things I’ve seen done when they pour concrete. The biggest slab, inside the shed, is 19’ x 21’. The concrete truck won’t be able to back in there, so I’ll dump it in the loader bucket and drive that into the shed to dump it in place. And I’m adding a trench drain in there just to complicate it and make it more funner.
I’ll be glad when this is done. And smarterish.
Every now and then I have dreams about water. They say water dreams represent your emotions and it’s the depth and clarity that matter in the dream. Clear or shallow mean you’re peaceful. I’ve had dreams of a hose running clear water across the floor. Nice. Last night I was driving through a flooded street which I didn’t realize was flooding until I was pushing a wave in front of the car’s grill. Not sure of the clarity of it… yeah. I need to get this done and get this show open.
This time next week it will all be better.
ARE THERE SONGS ABOUT CONCRETE? OR PREP WORK, OR DIGGING? *
*I tried asking AI for questions, involving all this stuff but its questions were just dumb.
A couple of comments yesterday made me think that I have probably never explained the process of making a Ukrainian egg or “pysanky”. I’ll try to keep it simple!
Larger eggs are easier, although I did a fun series of three teeny eggs a few years ago. A rinse in white vinegar gets any residual grease off the egg. You work with a whole egg, uncooked and not emptied.
Ukrainian egg dying is a little similar to batik. You apply melted wax to the egg and then dip it in dye. You repeat this, from your lightest color to you darkest until you’re done and then melt all the wax off. A very traditional pysanky will be white, yellow, orange, green, red and black but there are plenty of other designs using other shades (blue, purple, pumpkin, brown, etc.) After you are all done with waxing and dyeing, you melt all the wax off the egg (carefully) to reveal your design in all its glory.
There are a few tools for making pysanky. The most critical is called a kistka and it is the tool that you use to melt the beeswax and to apply the wax to the egg. I have two kinds of kistkas. The traditional kistka which is held over a candle to melt the wax and an electric kistka, which keeps the wax cone hot without having to use a candle. Both traditional and electric have a variety of widths, depending on how thick or fine you want your wax lines. I tend to use both during a project. The beeswax has a black additive these days; without it, the wax is hard to see on the egg if you’re using electric – no carbon from a candle flame!
After you’ve melted off the wax, that’s when you add the varnish. This is an important step because it not only makes the egg shiny and pretty but it adds a bit of strength to the shell. If you are making pysanky that are being displayed but are not ornaments, then you are done. Eventually the insides of a Ukrainian egg will dry up and you can hear the dried yolk rattle if you shake them. (If you break one before it’s all dried up – get a clothespin for you nose!) If you are making ornaments, you’ll need to blow them out and add a finding to the top so you can thread it with twine, floss or some sort of string.
The most frequent question I get is how long an egg takes and it depends entirely on the complexity of your design. This year’s egg, if I did one at a time, from beginning to end would take about 75 minutes, but since I’m doing several at one time, that cuts down the time to about 55 minutes each.
Of course, there is plenty more I could say, but I’ll save that for when you ask me!
The egg table is up. And it only took two hours to completely torpedo this year’s design.
Many years ago I started coordinating my holiday crafts to a central theme. In addition to the Ukrainian egg ornaments, I also make the cards as well as kid ornaments and 6×6 decorated calendars. I try to tie all these items together every year. One year I did a snowglobe theme, one year the theme was “branches”. Peppermint, polar bear, gingerbread men, birds have all been done. There are a few themes that get repeated – holiday trees is one of those and also poinsettias.
This year’s theme is Santa. The card, the kid ornament and the calendar were seriously easy but the egg has been difficult. First off, there just weren’t many idea out there to start with and most that I found were painting on eggs, not traditional wax/resist. I had one idea and then when I sketched it out the first time, I realized it would be too hard to get all Santa’s proportions correct on an egg. Then I turned to clipart – a surprisingly good way to generate ideas for Ukrainian egg design. I messed with the idea for a couple of weeks and thought I had a good design.
Suffice it to say that drawing curvy lines in hot wax on an egg isn’t an easy thing to do. Then add fiddling around with mixing different dyes to get Santa’s skin right. Leaving space for his eyes was a pain. But the biggest issue was just too much white and a bit of red then a black background; it was just — blah. And I didn’t like the side border either, although that could have been remedied. I completed two of the design and then abandoned it.
I spent about an hour going through my egg design books and a couple of online places and finally found something that I could alter. There is no actual Santa on the egg, but it has a lot of red and white, with a black background and I was able to add “ho, ho, ho”; that’s as close as we’re going to get. This design is more complicated than the failed Santa image, but much more satisfying. I managed to get three done before I just couldn’t sit on my hard chair any longer – the design is solidified so now I’ll be on a roll starting this morning – after I feed the bad Santas into the garbage disposal!
Have you ever had to abandon what you had initially thought was a good idea?
It’s the time of year that I start to think about hand pies. When I was a kid, Nonny would occasionally make an apple pie (no other kind that I can remember, just apple). Depending on how many scraps she had left over, she would make either cinnamon pinwheels or every now and then “mini pies” (what we called them). I didn’t realize until I was well into my adulthood that the rest of the world calls these hand pies. And they are my favorites!
In my early years of hand pies, I just cut out the hand pies using a knife – triangles, rectangles and even circles. Then several years ago I purchased a set of molds that make a rectangle shape, a “pie” shape and an apple shape. These aren’t actually any easier than just cutting the dough by hand, but they are a lot more fun.
In August I saw an ad online for a cat shape/dog shape set of molds from Sur La Table. They are incredibly cute but way too expensive for an addition to my kitchen equipment that can only be called whimsical. Now that we’re getting close to apple picking (or apple picking up, depending on my knees), I’m thinking about hand pies. So yesterday morning I looked up the cat/dog molds online to see if anyone sold them less expensively than Sur La Table. Nope.. didn’t find them. HOWEVER, thanks to my search, my online world has suddenly been flooded with ads for hand pie molds. There are a lot of different companies out there selling lots of designs.
I’m currently seriously eyeing a holiday set and have looked up some more filling recipes. The three top new contenders are Lemon Cream Cheese & Raspberry Jam, Walnut Cinnamon Sugar and Nutella Hazelnut. In an age of trying to rid myself of stuff, I’m thinking I need my head examined thinking I need more hand pie molds. We’ll see how long I last….
Sure has been a good year for walnuts based on how many are falling onto our deck and deck table. We have to be careful walking out there or they will bonk us on the head. We have one Horse Chestnut tree back there, too. I planted it from a seed I picked up at our church when I was a kid. Mom says I dug it up every couple days to see if it was growing and it’s a wonder it ever grew. It has a lot of chestnuts on it this year. I like how smooth they are and the rich dark brown of the nuts. (I glued a bunch onto a chair to look like barnacles when we did ‘The Little Mermaid’ at the college).
The other day I picked up daughter and we went home. Two hours later I was going to take her back into town, so I didn’t want to get myself into too much trouble. Don’t get your clothes dirty, I told myself. I backed the hay rack into the shed in case it rained (which it didn’t) but If I had left it out, the 8 bales on it for the next PossAbilities hayride would have gotten rained on for sure.
And then I thought to myself, don’t go dig a hole for the new concrete because if it rains, you’ll have a hole full of water. And then I went and dug a hole. I didn’t mean to, I meant to just clean up the edges using the tractor loader but I kind of got carried away. I took the excavated dirt back behind the machine shed as I’m building up that area for the lean-to, which is next summer’s project. There was that tree branch hanging down in my way. Course it was coming from 20’ up in a box elder tree and the loader bucket only reaches up 18’. So, I pushed the whole tree over. That’s the thing about box elder trees, they don’t have much of a root to them, and when the ground is wet like this, it’s pretty easy to push one over. A smart person will pay attention to the top of the tree so it doesn’t fall back onto the tractor. I’m grateful I have a cab that is designed to protect the occupant, but I’ve broken a lot of headlights and mirrors pretending I’m in a bulldozer rather than a farm tractor. I pushed that tree over, which leaned onto another tree, so pushed that one over too. None of this was the reason I went outside, but I was in the tractor and didn’t get my clothes dirty.
The third group from PossAbilites had a much warmer day for a hayride. I took a longer route, up on the hills. One kid didn’t want to get out of the van, and that’s alright. A staff member stayed back with them.
Last Saturday we hosted a “Combo Welcome & Movie/Pizza on the Farm Night” for Kelly’s work people, the staff and trainee’s in the Pathology division. It rained during the day and it took some effort to get the bonfire started, and we decided to have the movie in the machine shed because it was darn chilly outside. It was a good group, they ate a lot of pizza and popcorn, and they made a good dent in the 8 gallon rootbeer keg. The movie was our favorite, ‘Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium’.
You know, back when daughter graduated from high school we got a rootbeer keg. That was the first time I ever tapped a keg. My brother isn’t sure how we’re related if I had never tapped a keg before. So now I’ve tapped 2 kegs! Both rootbeer. My brother says I’ll be ready for actual beer next.
At the college I’ve been working on shirt sleeves. Swapped sleeves from some shirts to other shirts, and shortened them enough they still qualify as sleeves to keep admin happy, but not long enough to bug me. And this summer my nephew-in-law Justin gave me a Hawaiian shirt, with the sleeves cut off, because he had described me as “flowery”. In a good way! It didn’t have a pocket, but he dug one of the sleeves out of the garbage, and I added a pocket. All told, I swapped 4 sets of shirt sleeves. I’m not very good at sewing. I can manage, but it isn’t pretty. Good thing the seams are inside.
Sewing is sort of like construction. Just with other tools. When I was a kid, mom would let me fill the bobbin. I always loved threading the machine, and the bobbin on the little spindle that would “pop” over when full fascinated me for whatever mysterious reason. I didn’t bother changing thread on these sleeves. I picked a purple thread that matched some of the sleeves, and a teal colored bobbin thread and I just used them for everything because I like the colors. I tried using pins but I struggled more than one would expect with pins. It made me think of the strawberry pin cushion mom had. I wondered if I should get a pin cushion for the costume room, as opposed to the box of pins in there now. A magnetic one? Do I think it really matters?? I thought about thimbles too, and playing with them. And I had happy memories of mom. You never know do you; you let your kid do something, and 50 years later they’re swapping shirt sleeves.
Every mechanic knows you don’t tighten up all the bolts until everything is assembled and yet here I was struggling with getting the bolts lined up on the manifold for the 630. And there’s three gaskets in the middle of all of this and they shift and move while trying to get it all in place. There are six bolts that attach the intake and exhaust manifold to the tractor, and four bolt that hold the intake to the exhaust. I tightened the four bolts first, which is why I couldn’t get the other six all in place. I messed with it for an hour trying this that and some other things. Finally realized I had tightened those bolts. I loosened them, got all six bolts in place, THEN tightened everything up. Just like a professional.
Yeah, I should have put gloves on. Usually I do, this time I got ahead of my self. Between the black gasket maker goop, and the silver ‘Never-seez’ I put on the bolts, it took a while to clean my hands when I was done. all that fussing and I never got grumpy or mad about it. And that’s interesting. I have such a pleasant time working in the shop. Course working on the 630, part of that is, as I told Kelly, when I was milking cows usually I was fixing something because it was broke and I needed it and I didn’t have time to be messing around. I just needed the darn thing fixed ASAP to get on with whatever. But this is sort of a ‘just because’ repair so there’s no pressure– other than my mechanic for the carburetor asking me if I have the tractor running yet, so now I feel like he’s judging me. Other than that, no pressure. And I like that.
SEWING BY HAND AND THIMBLES AND PIN CUSHIONS. WHAT ABOUT THEM? WHAT PIN CUSHION SHOULD I GET?
Trail Baboon 