The wind howls,
The snow blows ( wish it would stick),
Chickens are locked in their coop with extra straw, food, water and scratch grain for entertainment and digestive warmth,
The wood stove is blazing and will stay stoked
As the temperature plunges to the negatives.
Wish I could stay in and enjoy, but eggs will quickly freeze in these temps so forays to the coop will have to happen til late afternoon.
Stay warm and safe my friends.
Blogs take on many forms I have realized as I read more and more of them. Some are religious in nature, some trying to promote someone’s business, a few are story tellers, many are online journals.
I tried journal writing beginning the year I moved to the mountains, alone, to help supervise the construction of our retirement log home on a small farm and to unretire from education and reenter the school counseling field for another 3 1/2 years until my hubby had finally sold his practice, retired and moved into our home with me. For three years, we had visited back and forth across the state, hard on the cars and our emotions. I thought journal writing would provide me with the necessary outlet, but I couldn’t get my thoughts down on paper fast enough and looking back at my efforts, it was mostly a pity party and complaints. I had retired from Virginia Beach City schools as a school counselor in 2004. This was just about the time that the state mandated testing set in motion by No Child Left Behind was starting to have teeth, affecting whether a child could graduate with a diploma or just leave school after 12 years with a Certificate of Attendance. The Testing Director for the city at that time had met with all of the counselors by school and told us that if there was a mistake made, that it would be our names in the paper, not his. I was dedicated to my job, a good counselor, a stickler for details when it came to record keeping and I also ran the Advanced Placement Testing program for our school, being responsible to the students, their parents who paid dearly for those tests and to the College Board, who took their exam process very seriously. That meeting was the straw that broke the camel’s back and I decided that since I had enough cumulative years and age to retire from the school system, that I would quietly go at the end of the school year. I was burned out, stressed. For the next two years, I worked a part time job for a non profit organization, but the third year, it would no longer be part time, and our house was under construction, thus my move. I was hired by the adjacent county’s school system as the lead counselor in a high school, again in charge of AP testing, but now also in charge of the Standard’s of Learning (yep SOL) testing for the school. My stress level again rose, the paper journal writing was not doing it for me, so I started using a feature in Facebook called notes. Then your posts in Facebook were limited to a set number of words.
About 3 or 4 years ago, I discovered blogging. This was the outlet I had been seeking, a place where I could journal, be creative, and put down the info quickly enough to get my thoughts on paper, you see, I type much faster than I could ever write by a factor of 4 or 5. My blog is my journal. I do publish it in a few places and yes, I like to see if anyone is reading it, but it is really for me, my journal writing outlet. Blogging helped me through the years until I retired with my hubby permanently and has continued as a creative outlet, a place to publish knitting patterns that I create, a place to write about the life on our little homestead, a place to share the new things we learn.
What is a blog? It is personal to each and every blogger. I love reading those of others and I keep adding more and more to my daily list to check for new posts but I shall continue to blog as my personal journal.
The holiday knitting was completed, the baby set, the finger puppets, 3 pair of kids socks, the scarf for my sister. That one required that I first spin the wool/silk blend, ply it, then knit the scarf.
Now it is my turn. A couple of years ago, I purchased a 3 1\3 ounce bag of wool/silk blend fiber from Green Dragon Yarns at a fiber festival. The color way was called Tidal Pool, predominately teal with other seaside accent colors. This bag of fiber has been in my stash since then. Today I decided to spin it into a single. Santa brought me a new wool coat for Christmas, so I don’t always look like the marshmallow man when I go out in my ski coat. My Ruby scarf and hat look great with it, but I wanted choice and decided that this new yarn to be is a good color.
I know there isn’t enough to ply for a hat and scarf. Recently when looking for yarn for the baby outfit, I purchased two skeins of Green Dragon Yarns fingering weight called Cypress.
The colors looked very complementary and though I have never plyed homespun to commercial yarn before, I knew it could be done and decided that was an excellent way to extend the homespun and make a yarn that would look great as a hat and scarf.
This is one skein of the plyed result. This is about 245 yards of yarn. When the rest is plyed, it should be enough for the scarf and bottom couple of inches of the hat, with the crown just the Cypress color.
The scarf is The Yarn Harlot’s pattern, One Row. Homespun Scarf. The hat will be a new design utilizing her stitch pattern from the scarf.
Last night, instead of sitting home like a pair of old fogeys, we used the internet to find a party at a hotel in a nearby town with a buffet dinner, a comedy show, then a DJ with dancing and a champagne toast at midnight. It took the DJ an hour or so to realize we weren’t 18 years old and he finally found some rock and roll music that got more folks onto the floor including an 87 year old partier who danced with all the gals.
Our New Year’s day tradition starts with huevos rancheros for brunch and the beginning of the packing away of the holiday trappings.
The tree has been removed, the needles vacuumed and the furniture returned to its usual seating configuration. The shelves dusted, all the Santas carefully wrapped in bubble wrap and stored in their large plastic tote. The windows and sills have been wiped down, the Christmas linens washed, dried and folded for storage for another year. One guest bed linens have been laundered and the bed remade. The basement guest bed still remains to be done.
The Christmas leftovers were removed from the freezer and tonight we will enjoy hot turkey sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy with one of the green vegetables that I carefully froze and packed away last summer.
The helter skelter of the holidays is behind us to be remembered and savored until next year. The winter calm is settling over the house. The farm chores are returning to our daily schedule and it is good to be getting our own eggs again, instead of them leaving with the neighbor that cares for the chickens when we are away. We are glad to be home again.
Life is good on our mountain farm.
The holidays are over and with it, the travel time. These past couple of months have been quite atypical for us. We travel little, other than my jaunts to Northern Virginia to babysit for a few days, we generally take a weeklong ski trip, boarding the pups and a week long visit to our daughter’s family with the dogs.
This fall we left on a two week adventure after boarding the pups. One week of that was a Bahamas cruise with our youngest son and his family, then spent an additional week with them in their home. The dogs like the boarding kennel we use, but were glad to be home.
That was followed with Thanksgiving at home with eldest son and his family visiting, then a week later, boarding the beasties again for our week long trip to Zihuatenajo Mexico.
Back home from that the second week of December in time to decorate and finish shopping for Christmas, we had a couple of weeks to recover.
Christmas brought eldest son and grandson back for a few days to celebrate together and Christmas noon, they left in my car headed north to home and we loaded up gifts, luggage, and dogs in Hubby’s SUV to drive south for 4 days with daughter’s family.
The visit was fun. The kids love the dogs, with our two plus their golden, it was a houseful of fur. Our pups stoically tolerate the 13 to 14 hours each way driving.
It has been great, but we are tired and ready to be home for the winter. My neighbor has gotten more of my eggs this fall than have we and the freezer is full of our produce we haven’t been home to eat.
All of this was on top of last February’s week trip skiing in Colorado, a 3 day ski trip in West Virginia, and the 3 day August trip for the family gathering. That has put us away from home in the past year for 42 days. We have exhausted our travel quota til our energy and budget recover.
The gift giving frenzies are done. Two days before Christmas I feared for the worst when I awoke with Norovirus. The day was miserable and the family left me to sleep and went to see The Hobbit. Fortunately Christmas Eve dawned over it. Our tradition is to have our Christmas dinner on the eve. The dinner was prepared, enjoyed and delicious. Christmas was a celebration of love and commercial avarice but so much fun watching the grands rip into their new gifts.
Santa brought me a new tablet and hubby a motorcycle jackest with armor for his new hobby.
We are loving family time, especially hubby who granddaughter has really decided is hers alone and wanted him to sleep with her last night.
Growing up, the tradition at Christmas was to have Christmas dinner on the eve of Christmas day. After dinner, stockings were hung and my sibs and I were shuffled off to bed so Santa could come. As an adult, I have heard some tales about this gift or that requiring assembly that only a child can handle. Our stockings were red felt stitched with white yarn and decorated with white felt cutouts, commercial and not very sturdy, fading and failing a bit more each year.
When I married and we started our family, I was committed to handmade stockings for each of us. I bought a crocheted pattern kit for hubby and decided that the same pattern could be made for me. The yarn for his is nice and firm and holds it shape well, mine on the other hand stretches and distorts. As each child was conceived, I bought a crewel work stocking kit which I lined for stability and wearability for each of them and the first two children got theirs for their first Christmas, the youngest didn’t get his until his second Christmas. Hey, after all, I had three children under the age of 7 and was outnumbered even with hubby’s help. Each of those stockings moved with the adult child to their new home, except eldest son’s and he generally spends Christmas here.
The tradition allowed the children to have their stockings as soon as they came downstairs to the living room, but the rest of the gifts had to wait for breakfast and the Christmas story.
When our second grandchild came along, daughter asked only a month before Christmas if I would make her son a stocking. Not having enough time to do a crewell work one and having yet to make socks successfully to knit one, I quilted it. It is cute, but firm and tight and hard to stuff.
Two years ago, daughter was due with her second in late November, but she asked way in advance and my knitting had improved to the point where I felt I could handle not only knitting the stocking, but doing colorwork to have a pattern on it. This stocking led to youngest son, who had also had a child that year asking if I could do one for his two children and our eldest grandson had never gotten his own stocking, so he also entered the queue. That meant I had 4 knit stockings to complete and send off by Christmas,
Traditionally, the toe of the stocking holds a small mesh bag of gold foil covered chocolate coins. They have become more difficult for me to find here in the mountains, but generally I can get them at Target. Not this year. There will be no gold foil covered coins, but the other traditions will live on.
I hope you and your family celebrate your special holiday with love and peace.
Today is the day that our eldest son and family arrive to spend Christmas with us. Today is Saturday and Saturday at their house is Mexican night. The family is trying to learn Spanish, so on Saturday night, when son hasn’t had to work all day at the University, he prepares a Mexican dinner and they watch a movie in Spanish.
If you have been following my blog for at least a few weeks, you know that we spent the first week of December in Mexico, Zihuatanejo, on the southern Pacific side of Mexico, a quaint fishing village with lots of seafood as their traditional food, but it is in the state of Guerrero which is also noted for its Pozole Verde. It is traditionally served in restaurants on Thursdays and we had a Pozole Verde lunch on our second day there. I have had white and red Pozole before, but this was so much better.
When we arrived home, I searched the web for a recipe and found this http://www.patismexicantable.com/2011/09/you_know_you_want_it_green_pozole/. It looks like the soup we had in Mexico and I decided to give it a try to help them carry on their tradition. As we raise some meat chickens, I had a nice plump bird in the freezer for the meat base. Being a locavore, the other ingredients don’t really fit my life style, limes, avocados, and tomatillos (this time of year) and as dry hominy is not available here, I bought Mexican style canned. The recipe says it is better reheated, so Thursday afternoon and evening, I stewed the chicken in the crockpot, deboned and shredded it and added it back to the broth. It was put aside in the soup pot in the refrigerator until Friday, when I added the Mexican hominy and made the verde sauce and added it. It went back in the refrigerator until just before dinner today, it will be cooked for the last 30-45 minutes and the garnishes will be cut and put in service bowls and we will see how authentic it tastes.
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Now if I could just find recipes for the tiny hot pepper stuffed empanadas and the tiny cheese stuffed fried cones of masa to accompany it, I could at least dream that we were back in Mexico on a Thursday.
This is borrowed from SouleMama’s blog. A single photo, no words that I wish to linger on and savor. Please leave a link to your “This Moment” in the comments for others to visit.
Cabin Crafted 