MISC -- 2015
It must be almost Thanksgiving; Kelly's cacti are blooming...
And so are the turkeys...
No, they aren't ours. They're from Gozzi's Turkey Farm in Connecticut. Kind of makes me want to get a few, though.
Here's a hodge-podge of pictures.
Our bad luck for the day was waking up to snow...
It did make for a beautiful sunset...
Kelly has been working on perfecting a Lemon Chiffon pie...
And here's Kody in bed...
It doesn't look like much, but he's started going off to bed by himself. Our little boy is growing up. He would usually lie out in the living room and wait for one of us to go to bed and go with us.
We had a new roof installed...
They stripped off the shingles and put up the metal in two days.
In celebration, I made pancakes today and tortured the dog...
Kelly asked me to take her picture and send it to Brandon. Little did she know...
We have a bumper crop of Monarch caterpillars this year. We took the dogs for a walk down the old highway the other night and saw about twenty in a mile. Kelly went back and took some pictures yesterday...
Oops. I seem to have dropped a piece of pound cake in the pot with the last little bit of the fourth batch of jam...
Whatever shall I do?
Happy Strawberry Day!
Can a pint of strawberries be eaten on four pancakes...?
Click <HERE> to find out.
I was out by the garage setting up the grill to cook dinner. I saw and felt the dog brush against the back of my legs. I turned around to him to get back in the yard and found something other than a dog.
Click <HERE> to see what it was.
I had all four wisdom teeth extracted today. Oh, what fun. Not! The worst thing any doctor has ever done to me. I'm using the Ace bandage to hold the ice packs against my jaw.
I got eight shots of local anesthetic. Numbed up my mouth so much I had trouble swallowing. Two hours later and it's just about worn off. It also made my lip itch, but I was afraid to scratch it for fear of ripping the skin.
The doctor vaguely described what he was doing as he was doing it. "You'll feel a lot of pressure," was code for "I have to push REALLY hard to push your gums out of the way and expose your jawbone." "Some vibration," was code for "I'm using the drill to cut away at your jawbone to free the tooth." And, "You'll hear a clicking sound," was code for "I'm breaking your tooth." "More pressure," as he held my jaw down and pried the pieces of tooth out. I think he put a foot on my forehead at one point for better leverage. Thank God they don't grow back.
Before the operation, the doctor showed me the X-ray and explained what he was going to do. He told me one a scale of one-to-ten, my operation would be a three. I can't imagine what would be worse.
I had called Tuesday to make an appointment, thinking it wouldn't be for quite a while since we don't have many oral surgeons in the area. "I have an opening on Thursday?" Great.
Went out to visit the Harmons on Saturday. After church, we went out and fed the deer and "turkies"...
There were about a dozen of each in the yard. Then, we went and checked Carol's sap buckets...
Hauled in about seven gallons of sap for the day. Boiled down, that will make about three cups of maple syrup!
Did a little yard work on Sunday. The snake that lives under the back steps was out on the warm, sunny rocks...
The pond is about six feet lower than it was last spring...
I also took a picture from the pond to show where the high-water line was...
I don't think the basement will have any water this year. And, I hope, the mosquito population should be down. We might actually get to sit out in the backyard this year!
My wife doesn't want me to have a motorcycle, so I'm guess a paramotor is a big nope, too. Yes, I was the one who wouldn't go more than three stories up in the glass elevator on the Ren Cen.
To get out of going skiing today, I made chicken soup...
It's a top secret recipe from Uncle Claude's "oma". I forget if that's his mom or grandma. No, I'm not allowed to tell you what the recipe is. I prob'ly shouldn't even be posting the picture. Those are matzo "balls" not-quite-yet floating on top, so it's almost ready to eat.
There's almost a gallon of stock outside on the driveway. When it's cool, it will be about as thick as jelly. I had pulled a couple carcasses and bags of pieces-parts out of the freezers and simmered them a couple hours while Kelly went skiing. I had a casserole dish piled up with parts to pick through to pull off all the meat. You can see how full the pot was...
You can thank us for the drop in gas prices. We hit $1.999 in Mercer yesterday. We put in a natural gas boiler to replace the old one that burnt fuel oil, so the oil companies drop the price of gas to entice more driving. Last winter, the coldest on record in Wisconsin, we had to get the oil tank filled twice at about $1000 each. We just got our first gas bill yesterday... $101. And that counts heating the domestic water, too.
Here is a picture of the boiler and water heater...
Of course, there are a couple things the installer didn't tell us about... The old water heater sat right under the bathroom/kitchen. The new one is fifteen feet farther away, so it takes about two quarts of water to get the hot to the faucet in the morning. (We catch it for the dogs or chickens.) And, the basement is a lot colder since the new boiler doesn't waste a drop of heat. The exhaust out of the old boiler was about 500°. It needed enough lift to get up the chimney. The new boiler vents directly out the wall, so the exhaust is only about 90°.