Ducklings

Our duck Lily, hatched 9 eggs last week. These are her first babies and she's being a very good Mum. Ken set them up in the horse trailer with a tub to swim in .

Clutching to little bits of beauty

Thank you so much to those who left comments and words of symathy. They really are appreciated so very much. Shirley, my heart goes out to you, love. I knew that when Mum passed away I would miss her terribly, but I wasn't expecting to decend into such a deep dark hole. I finally agreed to go to the doctor and get some help. Please pray that I'll be able to dig out of this mess soon.

Meanwhile, spring is all around us. The apple and dogwood trees are in full bloom. A huge rainstorm caused the creeks to overflow and wash out the road last week! A little bit of excitement. Yesterday we dug up a beautiful bunch of white narcisus we found growing by the roadside. I'm going to split them up and plant them in the borders, since the deer don't seem to have a taste for them.

I'll try to post more often.

To every thing there is a season...

Oh what a sad season it is at this moment.
I'm sorry for not posting for so long. I've actually been in England for the past three weeks. My lovely, Mum passed away on Sunday February 13th. She'd been in and out of the hospital most of last year and the beginning of this one with chest infections and pneumonia . She only had one lung due to contracting TB when she was 16 years old, so any chest infection was always a major worry for her- and us. As she aged she succumed  to other problems, involving her heart and thyroid. The medications for one tended to interfere with the meds for another. The doctors could usually get her back on an even keel within a few days, but this time she was in there for three weeks and they just couldn't get her stabilised.

Josh and I flew over there for the funeral and stayed another couple of weeks to help Dad go through Mum's clothes and things. A very difficult time. Ken came over for the final week to help me with the extra bags of items I wanted to bring back.

I managed to hold together quite well while we were over there. There was so much to do. I cleaned and sorted the kitchen from top to bottom so that it would be more organized for Dad. Family, friends and neighbors were constantly in and out for cups of tea and support, So there wasn't much time to sit and think. Now I'm back to the quietness of the farm, the loss of Mum is really hitting me. Even though there were so many miles between us, we were always best friends. Her phone company TalkTalk offered free 1 hour calls to the US so we made full use of that!

Well, that's about all I can write at this time, but I'll post more in the next few days along with some pictures of England.

Dying Yarn With Tumeric

I tried my hand at dying some hand spun yarn with Turmeric last night.
It was very easy. Set a pan with about an inch and a half of water to simmer on the stove. Add a couple of teaspoons of turmeric powder. Stir and let simmer for about 20 or 30 minutes. I had to add a bit more water as time went on. Then I added the hank of yarn and gently pushed it under the water with a wooden spoon. Let simmer for another 30 minutes. I liked the color at that point, so I then took it out and dipped in a bowl of very hot water for a few seconds. Then transferred it to another bowl of cold water. Kept changing the cold water until dye no longer came out of the yarn. Squeezed it gently to remove the water and hung it over the bath tub to drip dry over night.

I'm really pleased with the results!

Winter Knit-Along

I joined the girls on the fiber forum at Homesteading Today in a KAL. We're all knitting this pair of fingerless mittens.  The pattern is free but you may have to sign up for ravelry.

We've each been assigned a partner to swap with. My partner is Shazza and she's in Australia. She's probably sitting outside in her shorts, drinking tall cool drinks, while knitting my mittens, since it's summer and pretty hot down there. I, on the other hand, am stoking up the wood stove and gobbling down comfort foods, like these cheesy, drop biscuits!

Recipe from Joy The Baker  I just used regular cheddar for these.

Had to abandon the first mitten attempt when I saw a glaring error. I'd missed a whole row of the pattern! See all the tops are missing from the zig-zags at the bottom?

The yarn used is Blue Sky Alpaca sport, in streaky brown and light gray. It's extremely soft and will hopefully be keeping Shazza's hands all cozy and warm when I'm out in my shorts weeding the garden!

It's Alive!

I'm sorry, I fell off the blogging waggon. Right after New Year, we all came down with lousy colds and I lost all my inspiration for a while. It's that time of year. Not much exciting going on. We've been getting snow just about every week, but it hasn't accumulated very much. This week has been rather warm and melted what bit was left, except for a thick layer of ice on the road from the house to the barn. So we still have to wear Yak-Trax on our boots to keep us from falling and breaking something.

Anyway, the title is also referring to that bottle of milk in the picture. It really is alive! I ordered some Kefir grains from a lady by the name of Romey, over in Washington State: http://kefirwellness.com/

 You place the grains in the decanter and add regular milk. Let it sit out on the counter top over night, and the next morning you strain out the the grains and you have Kefir, which is a cultured milk, full of probiotics that are very good for you. The grains, which don't look like grains at all, more like little florets of cauliflower, feed on the lactose in the milk and grow and multiply. So once you have the grains, you never need to buy more. The milk has a slight yeast smell ( though it's not a yeast) and is a bit sour tasting. Some people, especially in eastern Europe, drink it straight, but it's really good when mixed with banana or other fruit and honey or maple syrup, kind of like a smoothie. You can also add it to pancakes or whatever recipe calls for milk. Not only that but if you leave it out for about 48 hours it gets thick. You remove the grains off the top ( they float to the top) put the thick kefir into a cheese strainer and leave to hang over night. The whey seeps out and you're left with a kind of cream cheese. I made some and added a few herbs and a bit of onion powder. It's delicious on crackers. Some, I just left plain except for a bit of salt, and that's good on toasted English muffins with jam for breakfast. Mmm, I'm so happy with my Kefir!

Come for a Boxing Day walk with us!

We had quite a nice snowfall on Christmas day and throughout the night. As usually happens after snow, high winds were due to come in, so we decided to head out for a walk while the landscape still had that pristine, magical calm over it.

                                                     We went out of the gate...

                                                and down the road...

around the mountain past the "house" next door.

Cheyenne, you said you always dreamed of living in this area, well, here's your starter kit honey! You would be welcomed by a colony of about 12 cats, a family of racoons, a stray dog and sometimes a bear!

The illustrator's house.
 

the old church. I mean to write to the current owners of this building and see if they would like to sell it. They live out of state and never come here as far as we can tell. I'd like to clean it up and rent it out as a knitter's retreat or place for local quilters to meet and sew! Just hate to see it standing forlorn and forgotten.

              The creek and another abandoned home.

interesting rock formations...

The creek winds its way from one side of the road to the other. Not too long ago these little low-water bridges didn't exist and the road went right through the creek. Even now when the water is high it covers the bridges and sometimes washes them out altogether.

long stretches of nothingness.

all the way to the very end ...

 where our dirt road meets the hard-topped road. Here, our creek meets a larger creek and continues its journey to the river and the ocean a few hundred miles away.

The main road up the mountain...

The long winding road down the mountain.

Looking back to the rickety bridge at the entrance of our road.  I always hold my breath when driving over it!

Heading home.

Abandoned farmhouse.

The creek and the church.

And we got back just as the wind started to pick up!

Time for hot soup and a cup of tea.

Merry Christmas!

Sending you all warm Christmas greetings. Thank you so much for reading my ramblings and leaving comments. I really appreciate it.

Love, Polly

It's beginning to look...

... a little bit like Christmas!

After working in a nursing home where my dept. was responsible for decorating all three floors for every holiday on the calendar, I swore I never wanted to decorate again!

Up until 2006, Ken was usually deployed to some foreign land at Christmas, so I managed to get away with not doing much at all. The last few years, he's been the one putting up the tree etc. This year, I'm feeling so good I actually want to decorate a little. But not the usual gaudy mess!


Thanks to Alicia, at Posie Gets Cozy , I got the idea to make these little Swedish style hanging wreaths for the windows.  We have a row of Leyland Cyprus trees growing along the fence line by the road and their branches turned out to be ideal! I Love simple and natural! 
 
That little tree on the coffee table was a  three dollar Christmas Eve clearance item at Walmart. It was the  year that Ken was in Saudi Arabia, and my MIL, on the phone, was appalled  that I hadn't "put up a tree for Joshua". I felt really guilty, and  hauled Josh off to the store to see what could be had. Wow, now I know why guys like to shop on Christmas eve! We got the tree and a beat up box of  tiny broken wooden ornaments for five bucks. Joshua thought it was the greatest thing, finding all the little wooden parts and gluing them back together.  
 
Poor kid. I was a baaad mama! 
 
 

Cat TV

Not much blogging getting done lately owing to frantic knitting. I'm trying to get a sweater finished for Ken in time for Christmas. He knows about it, but since we are having a very spartan Christmas this year, I thought it would be nice for him to have something to unwrap.

We really don't go all out for the holidays as we tend to buy things we want or need throuout the year. In fact we've accumulated so much "stuff" over the years, I need to be getting rid of things, not bringing in more! Ken already got what he wanted, one of those tripods with a pully for hanging deer or pigs etc. for butchering. I bought all that yarn a couple of weeks ago and paid the bill for the kidney stone surgery. A pain free Christmas and a pile of knitting is all I want. That leaves Joshua. He just wants a scope for his rifle. He's also been hankering to learn blacksmithing, so I'm going to enrol him in a course locally. Our nearest town, about 20 miles away has a population of only 450 people, but it's a very unique place, full of artist, artisans and musicians and an arts center offering courses in a wide variety of skills. I imagin next year he'll be wanting an anvil and all the blacksmithing tools!

Below are a few pictures taken over the weekend...

Dexter discovers "talking cat" videos on youtube!

It's Sunday, so here are this weeks  'through the kitchen window ' pics.

This is Ken cutting kindling for the stove. Kin'lin' as he calls it. Still a couple of inches of snow on the ground. The storm last week wasn't as bad as we'd expected. The power stayed on, though it doesn't affect us much when it goes out. We just light the oil lamps and transfer the milk and other perishables from the fridge to a cooler outside on the porch. If it's out for more than a couple of days Ken fires up the generator for an hour or two to keep the freezers cold. We kind of enjoy going back to 19th century living once in a while.

Winter Pictures

Below are few pictures from around the farm this last weekend when it warmed up a bit outside. Before we degenerated back into arctic conditions.

I haven't been blogging much beacause we've been experiencing such fierce winter weather this week. The day's have been a blur of slogging back and forth with feed and water for animals and keeping the woodstove going, - with a bit of knitting in between. The winds were so high it sounded  as if  there were jets sitting on a runway outside the back door!  The house was shuddering! I slept in the recliner by the stove so that I could keep it going all night. It will hold a fire all night with no problem, but when the winds are so high and variable, if there isn't a good blaze in the fire box  it will suddenly belch smoke right out of the blue. I think it's when the wind swings from the North. The lights kept flickering and we eventually lost  power on Monday afternoon from about 4 until midnight. Just a short outage by our standards. When it goes out, it's usually out for a good few days. Our neighbors across the road lost their water and called for help around midnight. So Ken had to go over and work on the pump in their spring house. Thankfully, he was able to get it going for them.  

Right now we are hunkering down for a snow storm which may be mixed with freezing rain, so there's a good chance we will lose electricity again if ice accumulates on the power lines, or trees fall on them. Never a dull moment here in the winter.

                            Looking back toward the house while taking a walk along the creek

                                                             The pigeons at feeding time.

                                                           Crystal Palace eating her hay.

Through the livingroom window, the sun coming around the mountain at three in the afternoon. Lady bugs on the window frame! (They're now in the vacuum cleaner :)