It was cold enough that I could make ice right out on the back stoop...

Here's my Christmas Eve hairdo...

Got a picture of the patient with her birthday cake...

This Christmas cactus bloomed for actual Christmas this year. Usually, they bloom at Thanksgiving...

And this orchid just started blooming the other day...

I took Finlay snowshoeing today out on the Little Turtle Flowage. We found some otter slides...

Also found what might be a den...

This slide goes downhill about ten feet...

We saw a couple of bucks sparring...

I caught a short video of the end...

Some of the Christmas cacti are blooming, at actual Christmas-time...

Speaking of Christmas, Finlay got her own stocking...

On the fifteenth, we got a wet, heavy snow that my blower couldn't move. The one track out to the right is as far as it got...

On the twenty-first-ish, it was about zero degrees and we got a dry, fluffy snow. By that time, I had changed the auger belt on the blower and it worked much better...

The chapel birdhouse has quite the pile of snow on it...

Last weekend we went for our first snowshoe of the season...

Ask the fox nicely and he'll show you some pictures...

It may not look like much to you, but I'm counting this one as a big win...

A couple weeks ago, Kelly dropped her phone while walking the dog.  Of course, the screen broke and made the phone unusable.  I moved her SIM and memory card into my old phone so she would have one to use.  None of her contacts were on the new phone.  So, I devised a plan to fix hers...

I bought one of the same model, pulled the brains out of it, and put the brains from hers into it.  The little piece on the left in the picture is the computer part of the phone.  The case on the right is her old one with the broken screen.  And the phone in the middle is the new one with the brains from her old one.  I haven't put the SIM in yet, but it looks like it'll work fine.

The process wasn't without drama...  The back of the phone is a paper-thin piece of glass that is glued to the case.  You're s'posed to heat it up with a hair dryer or heat guy and carefully pull it off.  I broke it on the old one.  Then I broke it on the new one.  Luckily, Amazon sells replacements.

And the screws inside were absolutely microscopic.  Almost too tiny for my Polish sausage fingers.

One day last week, I took the dogs hiking at the Powell Marsh...

Kody kept going and going, and I had to eventually turn him around at three-quarters of a mile out...

I didn't feel like carrying him back to the car.

Kelly and I took Finlay back Saturday...

We hiked a couple miles out, past Homestead Lake..

It's the lake in the southwest part of the map linked above.

We got about four inches of snow, so I gave the snowblower a little workout...

I did it mostly to keep the driveway from being full of ruts when the weather turned colder and froze the sloppy snow solid.

We've been doing a bit of hiking on the local trails this fall. We went out to catch sunset the other weekend...

I was out GPSing for a new address on the 19th last month and had a nice lunch spot...

A friend grew mushrooms this year and gave us a gallon-sized bag full of these jumbos...

On another day out-and-about in the County, I saw an eagle up in a tree...

And coming home from work one day, I found a small buck in the driveway...

We woke up to two inches of snow today...

But, the holiday cacti are already blooming, so I guess it's about time...

We hope you have a nice, quite Thanksgiving!

We are about six inches behind on precipitation for the year. Our pond has pretty much dried up...

The top of the birdhouse to the left is six feet above the ground. The base is about a foot above what little water there currently is. There have been a few years where it was almost under water in the spring.

I found a graham cracker crust sitting around doing nothing, so I turned it into a apple/oatmeal pie...

We've been hiking a lot to see the fall colors. A couple weeks ago we went to see some waterfalls in the County. This is Wren Falls...

Even the waterfalls are suffering due to the drought. Foster Falls is usually a full sheet of water instead of a couple trickles...

This has been the longest summer I've seen here. We still have some flowers around...

Kelly has been taking pictures everywhere we go...

This is the Little Turtle Flowage...

I took a picture of the both of us...

Of course, we've been taking Finlay. Even she gets to wear orange...

She tears up-and-down the trails...

We hit 82° yesterday. There are a couple freezing nights forecast for this week. So, it's the standard Mercer Hokey-Pokey Spring. Flowers start coming up, then it snows. This was two days before my birthday...

On the April 7th, we had Frog Day 2021. It was the first time we had ever seen all the leopard frogs out on the pond. Each spot on the water is at least one frog...

On April 13th, I drove to Rhinelander to pick up the piggies. The USPS would have driven them to Mercer for me, but they wouldn't have arrived until the next morning, sixteen hours later. Here they are in the dog crate in the basement...

In less than two weeks, I had to open the other half of the crate, they were getting so big...

Hopefully, this week is the last of the cold so we can move them out to the kennel next weekend. Here they are today...

We had a pair of geese on the pond yesterday...

First time we've seen that, too. We normally have mallards and blue wing teals hanging around. And the occasional merganser.

SYRUP

Let's see, we boiled on the 18th. Kelly had to work a fire on the 20th, so I did all the boiling. We boiled a third time on the 25th. The dogs were ever-present and ever-helpful...

By nightfall on the 20th, the stove had filled up with ashes, so I shoveled them and a bunch of coals out, and threw them on the snow. Looked a bit like pictures of the Iceland volcano...

We wound up with two large pots of almost-syrup in the freezer and one more in the fridge...

The freezer pots turned to slush. It was delicious...

We finished them on the kitchen stove Friday afternoon. The first and third batches were dark red...

And the second batch was orange...

I don't remember that happening in the past. Could be a whole bunch of reasons... Which trees the sap came from, the amount of sugar in the sap, the weather (temperature, clouds and sun, wind, air pressure), the temperature and length of boiling. We ended up with a pint more than two gallons.

WATERFALLS

Yesterday, we went up to Black River to see the waterfalls. They were really running with all the snow melting off...

That's just a drain pipe under a walkway. This is Great Conglomerate Falls...

Potawatomi Falls...

That picture is from an overlook right at the falls. Here's one from down river...

Gorge Falls...

And all those roiling waterfalls empty out into Lake Superior...

There were another two waterfalls we didn't see... The rain was going to start soon, so we headed home.

One of our cactususes bloomed for Christmas...

Kelly got a new, super-duper lens for her camera. She took it out to get pictures of the moon and Jupiter and Saturn the other night...

We slept in today. Then opened presents. Then talked to a bunch of people. Then went for a snowshoe hike. It was about 16°, but sunny...

Here's a group picture...

Kody is getting too old too go for the whole hike. We did the warm-up loop with him, then let him rest in the car.

We made a rotisserie chicken for dinner...

Kelly had leftover dressing mix, so she made that to go along with the chicken...

It was all delicious. We hope you had a good day!

The temperature went up to 45°, so I decided to grill up some brats for dinner...

There are Tater Tots in the pan which turned out more like hash browns, but they were still yummy and crunchy.  We took the dogs for walks then grilled, so the picture was at almost 7:30.  I was working by the light of my headlamp, again.

We have a little snow on the ground...

Nothing like last year's foot-and-a-half. It was up to 37 degrees today.

The Thanksgiving cacti started blooming last week...

Kelly cooked us a huge turkey...

If you get really close to the screen, it looks pretty big. It was moist, and juicy, and delicious...

I watched a dozen YouTube videos to get the carving lines right.

We had all the important parts...

Turkey, gravy, and carbs... Potatoes, dressing, biscuits.

Kelly is taking the dogs for walks, so we haven't cut into her home-made pie, yet...

Kelly made a big pot of chicken soup last weekend...

Early yesterday morning, we went out to a farm and met this big pig...

Here's the rest of his family...

This weekend, we've been making tomato sauce...

Had a beautiful weekend last weekend. Kelly had to work Sunday for fire protection, so I took Finlay for a walk in the woods...

We found an old Dodge on one of our walks...

The biggest surprise is that it's not full of bullet holes.

We emptied out the gardens and threw most of what was left to the chickens. We have the spare bed covered in tomatoes we hope to finish ripening...

Yesterday, we got snow...

There was about an inch on the grill...

It all melted by the end of the day. Today, we were in the mid 30s. Had to put on our long underwear for the first time to take the dogs for their walk. I don't have a picture for that. :)

Looks like it is currently peak color up here...

Well, the first signs of Autumn are appearing.  Trees are starting to turn...

Kelly found a pile of mushrooms...

The flannel sheets are back on the bed...

Claude and Kelly do stained glass in the driveway...

And finally, the Northern Air Conditioners burrow into their winter den sites to hibernate...

I was at the gas station at the four-way stop in Hurley and saw this guy across the road...

Yes...  That's a duck. I had to surreptitiously take the picture out the window of my car, so I didn't get a good one.

We had a hot July.  Finlay decided she liked the fan blowing the air-conditioned air out of the bedroom...

I've been out-and-about in the County, GPSing driveways for Emergency Services.  I saw a pair of fawns today...

I whistled to get them to both look up at the same time.

It's butterfly season! If you ask His Majesty nicely, he'll show you more pictures...

I found a baby Gamera...

Our resident snakes are still around...

We had Chicken Day on the 13th.  Thirty-three birds this year...

And today is Strawberry Day!...

We've been a bit busy this month of May. I had to do some surgery on the rototiller to get it running again...

The aspargus is up and doing well this year. We've been eating it almost every-other night so far...

A couple apple trees arrived in the mail one day. We had just cut down a couple of the spruce trees in the front yard, so that was where the new apples went...

The trees have leaves and the wild flowers are blooming. Fire Season is pretty much over for Kelly. We had some nice violets in the lawn...

And today we went down to Wausau and bought a new Subaru Forester...

Kelly tried taking some credit for the apple trees. She did do nearly all of the research into the new car.

I've been on Youtube a lot looking for new recipes.  I found one for pizza I thought I would try.  I think something went sideways part-way through...

Ask Finlay to show you more pictures...