Firewood To-Be

We had twelve cords of maple in 8 foot lengths delivered to our backyard yesterday afternoon. Both of our wood sheds are going to end up very close to empty after this year's heating season, and one of our first projects for this spring is to get them filled again so the wood has time to season and dry before next fall. Biting the bullet and purchasing this logger's truckload hurt the homestead pocket book but will expedite tremendously the time spent getting next year's wood ready. Actually, these twelve cords should last a good bit more than a year's time for us.

Can't you almost read Roy's mind as he contemplates the stack? "Dang, I wish this was all cut, split, and stacked in the wood sheds.”

We'll hit it as soon as the snow is gone (and before the bugs come out) and be all the healthier for the exercise it'll give us working it up. (Golly-gee, I can hardly wait for the fun to begin.)

P.S. You can see my postings are still coming out a little wonky, but at least I can post, and thanks to my husband and some support help, my computer isn't as sick as it was yesterday. We'll keep working on it.

Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!

My husband loves coffee. I mean he LOVES coffee. Because he's health conscious he's not someone who drinks it all day, but it's those first two cups in the morning that make his life worth living and the other one as a pick-me-up around three in the afternoon that keeps him alive and alert and happy for the rest of the day.

He blames his love of the stuff on a good friend of his mother's, "Aunt" Rosemary. A memory of visiting at Aunt Rosemary's house when he was about five years old stands out in his mind. The ladies were having a chat over coffee, and he asked if he could please have a cup. (I've always suspected he was a precocious little bugger.) Aunt Rosemary dutifully poured him a cup of milk and added a dollop of her good, strong coffee. Roy says that was it for him. There is simply something in coffee that his body needs and cannot function without. But it must be good, strong, full-bodied, well-brewed coffee.

In Roy's lifelong quest for the "perfect" cuppa joe, he asked his daughter and son-in-law for an old-fashioned percolator coffeepot last Christmas. Of course, our daughter (who inherited a good dose of her father's "research" genes) found a nifty little stainless steel number that now gives him his requisite two cups of wonderful coffee each morning.

This perked coffee has turned out to be of such excellent quality that he decided we really should have a bigger percolator pot that would brew more cups at a time, in order to serve company. So he found this old Revere Ware pot on eBay that turned out to be in dandy shape.

I just love the looks of this coffeepot . . . so sturdy, so 1950s, so forever!

Even though I'm not a true, pure, coffee drinker (both my parents were big-time java lovers and often said they wondered if my brother and I had both been switched in the hospital at the time of our respective births because neither of us ever cared for the stuff), I do like my homemade latte most every morning. My little, cheapo espresso machine provides that one luscious cup of foamy milk laced with a little coffee flavoring which is just fine for me. But I sure do delight in the smell of Roy's perking coffee wafting through our house each morning now. I don't think you can get a better coffee aroma than from a percolating coffeepot.

Ah, yes, it truly is the little things in life. Or perhaps it's not such a little thing when you enjoy coffee the way my husband does. Take time to smell the roses? Absolutely. But don't forget the percolating coffee, too.

Big Trouble in River City

I'm having trouble posting an entry today and having other difficulties with my computer in general. I'm suspecting I have some sort of an ugly-buggly bug so if I disappear from the scene for a while you'll know my computer is in sick bay.

A Special Breakfast

Breakfasts on a Sunday morning should be a little special. I don't often make this very (to my mind) tasty little concoction because my husband isn't crazy about it. But since Sundays have been decreed "every man for himself" when it comes to food preparation and eating, having me prepare this for breakfast today means he didn't have to get his own meal. Therefore, he cheerfully gobbled it up. (Not only did he seem to enjoy it, but when I started to take the last portion left out of the dish saying, "Oh, the chickens are gonna love this little treat," it sparked a small hissy fit. "CHICKENS!!?? We're not gonna waste those luscious blueberries on the chickens. Leave it on the counter and I'll finish it later.")

In case you get a hankering to give it a try, here's the recipe:

BANANA-BLUEBERRY PUFF

1 tablespoon butter

1/3 cup flour

1 tablespoon sugar

1/4 teaspoon salt

3 beaten eggs

1/2 cup milk

1-1/2 cups fresh or frozen blueberries

1 sliced large-ish banana

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

1 rounded tablespoon sugar

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Put butter in a 9" pie plate and place in oven until melted and hot. In a bowl, combine the flour, 1 tablespoon sugar and salt. Add the eggs and milk and whisk until smooth. Pour into the hot pie plate. Bake for 12-15 minutes or until edges are puffed and golden brown. Remove from oven. Place blueberries and banana slices evenly in puff. Sprinkle with cinnamon and rounded tablespoon sugar which have been combined. Cut into wedges and serve immediately.

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The original recipe said it would serve four but the two of us often finish it with no problem. Needless to say if you're using frozen blueberries (as I did), let them defrost first. Ones that have been frozen aren't as nice as fresh, but still quite tasty.

As you can see by the above picture, I didn't get a lot of poof to my puff this morning. Sometimes it gets grotesquely high and the next time it will be rather demure like today. It must be dependent on atmospheric pressure, or the phase of the moon, or whether I'm dressed or still in my jammies.

I keep thinking I should try using other fruit . . . strawberries and blueberries? Strawberries and bananas? Fresh peach slices and blueberries? Mmmmm, raspberries! But I like the banana and blueberry combo so much I have yet to venture away from that.

At any rate, it makes a nice, different breakfast with which to start a lovely Sunday.

A Breath of Spring

Well, it's as close to a feeling of spring as we've come for a long time anyway. Are you ready for this? Ta-dah! We had a temperature in the mid-40s today. Now I know many of you would say that such a reading in your part of the country is in the downright chilly category. But you have to realize that for us living just a hop, skip and a jump away from Santa Claus Land, it is really warm. I can hardly believe how much of our snow melted. Areas in our yard and drive that have been inches thick of solid ice for the past many moons morphed into mush today. My husband could hardly control himself. He manhandled the coil of hose out of the garage, hooked it up to the outside spigot and washed the truck!

On my way to recycling this morning, as I was driving through town, I saw a guy coming out of the grocery store and all he was wearing was a gray, short sleeved t-shirt. (Well, I mean that was all he was wearing 'on top', of course.) True, he may have been 1) delirious because of experiencing a temperature above freezing for the first time in 5 months, 2) rushing things just a bit, or 3) off his medication. But then it could have just been a case of rebellious thinking, 'I'm tired of wearing that blasted heavy parka, and I'm not gonna do it anymore.' More power to him. I'm sure he had ripples of goose bumps all over his body to keep him warm.

In celebration of this day's breath of spring and hope of flowers to come, I thought I'd share this quilted piece. It's not new but rather one I made when my quilt group had a challenge where all of us were to make a piece incorporating curves . . . a little challenging (hmmm, is that why they call it a 'challenge'?) when working with fabric which is usually happier to be stitched together with straight seams.

I'm truly not a flower fabric kinda gal but for some reason chose to use several floral prints this time.

Here's a close-up so you can actually see the flowers.

Can true spring and the hardiest of spring flowers be far away when the snow level is visibly decreasing and we're sorely tempted to take the grippers off the bottom of our Sorels?

Needed: A Dose of Sensibility

When we first moved here to Minnesota from Illinois in the 70s, I wrote my folks a letter at least once a week. Some twenty years later, my mom gave me several boxes containing all of my old letters. Mom's been gone twelve years this coming Tuesday, and I'm just now starting to read through those letters.

The one I picked up tonight was written in June of 1979, and I was answering a question regarding our dairy goat herd. Just reading what I wrote brought back such memories. Waaaah , I wanna get goats again. (Please, somebody stop me. I don't want to be tied down with twice a day milking right now. I don't want to lie awake nights in mid-winter wondering if the goats are staying warm enough.)

The nucleus of our herd was just being built at that time. We had three Nubian milkers: Maggie, who was 5 years old, and the best goat ever personality-wise and a good, steady milker; Misty, 4 years old, a sweet, small doe who was a lovely frosted silver color; and Debra, 3 years old, a beautiful, red, huge, heavy milker who was the biggest klutz in goat-dom. She couldn't hop up on the milking stand without tripping and getting down wasn't much better. (Ever try to catch a large goat so she didn't fall on the floor?) Gosh darn, she was clumsy.

We had been taking our does down into Wisconsin to be bred but soon tired of that and decided it was time to keep our own bucks. Barley was only 3 months old at the time of the letter and had just been joined by Brisbane who was 3 weeks old. (Well, he would have Brisbane as a room mate as soon as Brisbane was old enough.)

The two yearling does not yet producing were Gretchen and Jenny. We had just had two doe kids, Zoey (guess I've always been fond of that name) who was Brisbane's sister, and Emily, one week old, who had just arrived from another homestead and was being bottle fed.

That's another thing I don't want on my list every day right now . . . bottle feeding kid goats three times a day. Or do I? No. NO. NOOOO! But, gosh, thinking of those goats does bring back good memories. Sigh.