Relaxing Weekend

We had a beautiful warm sunny weekend!!  And we FINALLY made it to the cabin!!  In a previous post I told the little story about why we couldn't get there last time.  This time we took our Side x Side, but we still could've made it in the truck cuz we found that someone had filled in that big mud pit.   So we still didn't get that old bed to the cabin, but that's okay.  Another time.

There really isn't much to tell in this post cuz nothing exciting happened.  It was just a time of quietness, tranquility, privacy, and work.

First, we had to vacuum up all the dead flies.  The cabin is full of them every spring.  Pretty disgusting.  But that's just part of cabin life, I guess.

Then Chuck wanted to cut some wood up.

So while he was doing that, I went for a stroll in the woods to check on my blueberries.  Last year they didn't do well at all.  This year they are looking pretty good -- so far.

After my stroll, Chuck was still cutting wood, so I bleached out the outhouse and got that all cleaned out.  Another one of those spring cleaning projects.

Then I made myself a nice hot cup of tea.

Since the outhouse was nice and clean now, I wasn't afraid to use it.  Therefore it didn't bother me to know that the tea was going to run right through me and I would have to use the outhouse.

So I sat outside on the porch sipping my tea, listening to the sound of Chuck's chainsaw, and admired my clean outhouse.

Soon enough the sound of the chainsaw stopped, so I went over there to see if I could help him with anything.  Now he was splitting the wood and throwing the pieces into piles.

I knew he wanted the wood stacked in the wood shed, so I told him, "if you bring the Side x Side over here, I can load this up".  So he did, probably thankful for a little break, and I loaded the wood into the Side x Side, while he continued to chop away (he's pretty sore today).

And then we stacked it into the wood shed.

All that kindling wood was removed and put onto the porch for easy access before we stacked the new wood.  The wood shed is pretty full now.

After the work was done, Chuck went for a stroll through the woods with me to see the blueberries, and then we took a joy ride on the Side x Side through the trails before we packed up and went home.

There now you see?  It wasn't an exciting weekend.  But it was nice being there.  

How about a big pile of moose poop for excitement?  No?  Well, I tried!

Kasha Encounter

I found some kasha (buckwheat) flour at the Natural Pantry store last week to experiment with it.  It's kind of an ugly unappealing color and has a funny smell to it, but it's supposed to be really good for you.   It boasts of having all of the amino acids that a human being needs, especially lysine.  Plus it's high in copper and magnesium and your B vitamins.  AND it's high in protein, easy to digest, and gluten free.  (not that gluten is an issue for me).  But in this recipe, only 1/2 cup was distributed into the whole thing, so that's probably not enough to be of much significance, but just to make myself feel better, I figure anything healthy that's added to the evil white flour has to make the evil white flour not as evil.  Just my theory.

It looks and feels exactly like volcano ashes.  It even has the little black specks in it.  When you rub it between your fingers, it feels like soft talcum powder.  If it tastes anything like it smells, do I really wanna eat it?

In one of my recipe books, I found a recipe for Kasha Bread.  The recipe calls for kasha groats that I was supposed to cook, but I modified the recipe for kasha flour instead, since that is what I was working with.  I looked at some pictures of kasha bread on the internet to get an idea of what kasha bread is supposed to look like, but they all looked unappetizing to me because they looked dense.  I guess I learned to expect healthy looking brown breads to be heavy and dense.  I like my bread light and fluffy so, feeling turned off of this experiment, I was going to give up it, while I imagined myself chucking a hard brick of bread into the garbage and saying "well, THAT was a waste of my time!!".

But then curiosity got the best of me so I went ahead with the experiment.  The recipe called for 7 cups of flour total, which I knew was going to make a lot of bread, so I cut the recipe in half, using 2 cups "evil" white flour, 1 cup whole wheat flour, and 1/2 cup kasha flour.  Usually I don't use a 2:1 ratio of white/wheat flour cuz the bread ends up heavy.  I usually prefer to use a 3:1 or a 4:1 ratio.  Plus, not knowing what the kasha flour was gonna do it, my hopes for this bread weren't very high.

Maybe it's because I had to modify the flour into the recipe (instead of using whole groats), but I ended up using extra white flour because the dough was too moist.  But after I got it all kneaded together, I became more hopeful for the outcome of this bread.

The drought turned out nice and soft, and didn't feel heavy at all, and it had no problem rising.  See my finger indentation?  It's ready to shape into loaves now.

Instead of the tradition 9x5 (meatloaf) pans, I prefer to make my bread in the 8x4 pans.  Every time I make bread in the 9x5 pans, the slices won't fit in the toaster very well.  Besides, I like my bread slices a little smaller anyway.  So I divided the dough into two 8x4 pans.  And they rose very nicely.

And here is the finished product:

Don't let the brown color lead you into thinking it's one of those dense heavy breads.  This bread actually turned out nice and squishy, and it tastes good too!  This recipe is a keeper!  NOM-NOM!

And it passed the hubster test!!!

Here is a picture of Kiska who doesn't care at all for Kasha Bread.

Pre-Gardening

I didn't want to write so many posts about gardening this year cuz I know that gets tedious and boring to all my many numerous fans out there (yeah, all two of you!), but I wanted to show you what we are doing different this year.  Here is a picture of the greenhouse that we found at Costco:

For the price, it's actually a pretty good one.  During the first few days after we put it up, we kept checking the temperature inside to see how it fluctuates during the day, just to get an idea of whether or not it would be warm enough.  And, oh yes, it does get it warm in there!  And humid!  

So yesterday, we went a little farther in getting it ready for planting.  Here Chuck is mixing up some new dirt to put into the planter pots:

This year, we decided to try these "Smart Pots" after Chuck heard about them:

They are made of some kind of fabric that's supposed to absorb heat and also let the roots grow freely.  My initial intention was to have one pot for each tomato, zucchini, and cucumber plant.  But right now I have 10 tomato, 3 zucchini,  and 3 cucumber plants started, and at $7 for each Smart Pot, it would be expensive to use only those for these plants.  So we came up with another alternative:

We put a garden bed inside the greenhouse.  The greenhouse is 10' x 10', and the garden bed is 4' x 8', so that gives me room on either side of it to line the sides of the greenhouse with pots if I still want to use them.  This year we are starting with 4 Smart Pots just to try them out.  So I'm going to use one for tomatoes, one for zucchini, and one for cucumbers, and the last one for corn.  Then I will plant the rest of the tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and maybe some corn in the bed, and that way I'll be able to see if there's any difference as to what growing method works best.  The bed will also provide me a little more room to start more seeds in there if I want to.  I am just waiting until late May to make sure it'll stay warm enough there at night cuz we don't have a heater in there.  Maybe next year we'll have one if this year proves that we need one.  The plants that you see there on the left are the ones that I keep hauling out there from my windowsill every day when I know it will be warm enough in there for them.  So far they seem to really like being out there, but every so often I have to go out there and check to make sure they aren't getting burned up.  So far it's been working to partially keep the door unzipped and/or open up the window flap if it gets too hot in there.  By the way, I get a sentimental feeling every time I go into the greenhouse because Chuck mixed some fertilizer into the dirt and it smells like a barnyard in there!!  AAAHHHHHHHhhhhhh..............!  I love the smell of cow manure!!!

While Chuck was mixing dirt together, I decided to try planting some of my "cold weather" seeds.

On my window sill, the only "cold weather" plant that I already started was a lettuce plant.

It looks pretty lonely, doesn't it?

The other veggies that are supposed to be able to tolerate frost are radishes and spinach, so I went ahead and planted a few seeds.  But I didn't plant a whole row because I wanted to have a "continual harvest" - planting a few seeds every few weeks or so will give you a continual harvest instead of a whole bunch all at once.  Since I'm the only one who enjoys radishes, I thought this would be a good idea. Plus, if for some reason the seeds don't sprout on account of being too cold, then at least I didn't waste a whole row of seeds.  By the way, I saw this idea on Pinterest:  to write the vegetable name on a plastic utensil and stick in the bed.  Why didn't I think of that!!?

Kiska came out to join in what she apparently thought was "much ado", but for some reason she was being really skittish and kept running back into the house every time she felt spooked about something, like an airplane flying overhead, or maybe Chuck was getting violent with his shovel in the dirt, or the zipper on the greenhouse door was too loud, etc.,  I don't know, but she must've been in and out of the house a million times.

Here is how my rhubarb and chives are doing right now.  Coming along just fine!!

I've already snipped off some chives twice to use in my cooking.  I won't have to buy any green onions now for awhile.  I know, my flower garden looks terrible.  One of these days I will rake all those dead leaves out.  I always like to try and get that job done before the spiders get too prevalent.

So far, we haven't seen any moose in the neighborhood, and that's a good thing.  Maybe this year we will actually get to enjoy the fruits of our labor.  Now........I wonder how our blueberries at the cabin are doing.  We tried to go to the cabin this weekend, but instead of bringing the side-by-side, we brought the truck (because we were hauling Justin's old bed to the cabin to put in the loft).  Halfway through the backroads we ran into a deep squishy mud hole that had "TRAP" written all over it.  So Chuck tried to get past it by another way that ran adjacent to it.  That one didn't look AS BAD, but I kept telling him "don't do it, don't do it, don't do it".  He attempted it anyway, only with not enough "oomph", and of course we stalled in the middle of it, and the tires were happily spinning, yet we did not continue moving forward.  He managed to back us out of it, but he wanted to try it again.  Then it started POURING RAIN.  I told him, "the rain is only gonna make that mud hole softer and squishier.  I would rather turn around and go home then dig us out of a mud pit in the POURING RAIN!".  He still thought about it for a few minutes cuz he hated the idea of turning around and going back home.  But thankfully, he listened to me, which proves there's a first time for everything.

Her First Phone Call Home

This morning I received my first phone call from PW.  That is her on the right with her finger on her ear.  I can understand why she did that cuz I could hear a lot of noise in the background and now I can see where it was coming from.  I gathered from browsing through the pictures that it looks like the drill sergeants instructed them to stand in formation and pull their cell phones out of their personal belongings and then gave them a certain amount of time to call someone.  She was talking pretty fast and didn't say much, but she did actually sound like she was doing okay!  :-)  And that was what I mostly needed to know, but we also needed her address.  She wouldn't (or couldn't?) give me her address, but told me that she was in "Echo 113".  I didn't know until later that that meant she was in Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 13th Regiment.  And from that, Chuck was able to find her on their Facebook.  They just posted some pictures today and I think (but not sure) that they post pictures every other Monday.  There are all kinds of information on the Facebook page that I still need to read, but according to that, her graduation date will be July 2nd.

Here are a few other pictures of her that I found:



 Here they had just gotten loaded off of some white buses. (this was before she called me, according to the sequence of the pictures in the photo album on FB)

far right, back row

From what I gathered, they got separated into their four color groups.

She is in the "yellow" group, which, according to the Facebook page, means she's in the 4th Platoon (the Yellow Renegades).  And with that, we have her address!!  So I will definitely be writing her a letter today.

I can't wait until they post more pictures!!  This is only the beginning.  I hope to see photos of the adventures that are soon to come.  There are more pictures than these with her in it, but these are the best ones.  I am downloading all of them as I find them, and will make a scrapbook for her.  Oh dear, another scrapbook to do............................

Our Last Potluck (For Now)

Our church congregation has potluck every week, but today's potluck was extra special cuz it was the last one (sniffle!, sniffle!).  Well, not really.  It was the last one in our current building.  The good news is that our current building was sold (closing date is in a couple weeks from now) and we are in the process of building a new one for us to meet in.  The bad news is that the new building isn't ready for us to move into yet, so for the next several months we will be in the transitional phase.  The people buying our current building will be turning it into a funeral home, but they said we can still worship there on Sundays while we wait for our new building to be ready for us.  But we won't be able to use the kitchen anymore, so that is why today was our last potluck, but for me in particular, it means a little bit more than no more potlucks.  I have had the privilege of preparing the potluck drinks every week for the past several years; I'm guessing I've been doing it for about ten years now.  It means I have to get there about an hour early,  and it's one of those "thankless jobs" that not very many people are willing to commit to.  But I really really really really enjoy doing it!!!  Not only does it give me a special place (a special work to do) in the congregation, but it also gives me an opportunity to talk with people that I normally don't get a chance to talk to, plus I get to listen to conversations of other people that gather around the coffee pot, and sometimes I hear some pretty interesting stuff.  There is a reason why we prefer to call our potlucks "fellowship meals"; for me, the fellowship starts with making the drinks, and I am really going to miss that!

Here is the counter that I work behind:

I prepare the water, lemonade, unsweetened tea, sweetened tea, and of course the coffee.

It sure won't feel right not starting my Sundays this way anymore.

Here are some photos from potluck:

(Notice Chuck way in the back holding Dominic)

Of course Chuck had to hog Dominic:

He is SO ready to be a grandpa!  Unfortunately, that is not in our near future.  Every Sunday Chuck seeks him out and insists on holding him.

Look at all those desserts!  99.9% of the time I have the willpower to not even look at this table because I usually have sweets at home to eat, and I know that the last thing I need is more sweets to eat on top of the sweets that I have home.  

Anyhoo, today after church was over, Chuck and I started packing things up.  Since I'm the one that makes the drinks, I wanted to be sure and pack that stuff myself; otherwise I won't know where anything is later.  It felt really weird boxing all that stuff up because I kept thinking "won't I need that?"  I am so used to needing that stuff every week that I had to keep reminding myself that I will NOT be needing it again for awhile.  It just feels..........weird.  And kinda sad.

I wanted to post a picture of what our new building looks like, but I never got around to taking a picture of it, so maybe that will come later.

I will close with a picture of Bossy showing off her nice fuzzy arm.

She Serves Her Country

About a month ago, our daughter Kayla (PeeWee) did something that might change her life forever.  If it doesn't change her life, it will definitely make an impact.  She swore in to join the Army Reserves.

And last night she left for Basic Training.

Here the recruiter is helping her get her boarding passes.  And then he set it up so me and Chuck could go into the terminal with her.  So here we sit and wait.

The recruiter told her she had to be at the airport between 6:00 - 6:30, even though her plane didn't leave until 9:06.  But that's part of the military:  "hurry up and wait" is what they do a lot, so I guess she will have to get used to that.

This is my last image of her:

This is a bad picture, but she was actually smiling.  She said she was more excited than nervous.  I don't know how soon that will quickly die after she gets there, but hopefully she will maintain a good attitude.  

So, now that she's out of the way, I have the big task of cleaning her room.  Thankfully I have plenty of time to get that done cuz I'm gonna need it.  I would post a picture of her room here, but that would be too embarrassing.  Just use your imagination - it's pretty bad.  It is my hope that her military experience will kill some of her bad habits.

I also have other ways of staying busy to help me not worry about her so much.  For one thing, I started my indoor garden seeds.

My beets are already coming up.

I've also got some bigger pots started.  The three round ones are my pumpkin plants, and I have four square ones that I started some corn in.  Yes, I am going to try growing corn!  In Alaska! Is it possible?  I purchased a hybrid seed that was developed in Fairbanks.  The plants are kind of "dwarfish" and the ears will be smaller than the typical ears, but they are supposed to grow well in cooler soil and cooler climates.  So I figured I'd try it since I don't have much to lose.  I also have 10 tomato plants started.  I plan to can most of them - canning tomatoes will be a new experience for me.  Never done any canning before.

Chuck changed his plans a couple times regarding what we should do about a greenhouse.  The nice ones are SO expensive, so he was gonna just experiment with a crude "makeshift" greenhouse by using PVC pipes and Visqueen. But then we went to Costco (to buy PW a duffel bag for her trip), and they had a greenhouse there on display.  We ended up buying one cuz for the price, we thought they were pretty nice. And they only had two left, so we figured we'd better buy one (the lady at the checkout said that she wanted to buy the last one before it was gone).  I will send a picture of it after we get it set up.  I think that might be a while yet though cuz the temps cooled down and we got some snow last night.

I was expecting that and waiting for it.  I will not be fooled again.

Anyhoo, another thing I'm keeping myself busy with is quilting.  I did finally finish Steph's quilt.

This is the last stitch on the whole entire thing.  I was gonna have a whole different post dedicated to it, but I wanted to include a picture of Steph with it.  But I don't know when I'll see her again, so I decided to just throw it in with this post.

Here is a picture of the whole quilt, all done.  At last!  It takes a long time to sew a quilt top together by hand.

Right now it's at the cleaners.  It was all full of cat hair and I didn't want to give it to her like that, even though she has a cat and a dog of her own, so it probably didn't matter.

Here is the next quilt I'm working on:

It's not a very good picture, but it should look something like this when it's done.  I saw a model of it on display at the quilt store about 2-1/2 years ago and bought everything I needed for it.  It took me this long to start working on it cuz I wanted to finish Steph's quilt first.  Anyhoo, I was disappointed cuz the first thing I discovered was that whoever cut the panels off the bolt did a very sloppy job.  They cut too close to the panels so I couldn't make my panel blocks as large as they were supposed to be, which meant I had to readjust the measurements of the borders that go around the panels, in order to make those blocks the right size.  But now that I got them the right size, everything else seems to be falling into place okay.  The other thing is that I didn't have one of the fabrics cuz when I bought all of the materials, they were out of two of the fabrics need to make this.  One of them I found on-line and am still waiting for it to come in (should be here any day now).  The other fabric I'm looking for is the back panel.  But I can look for that later when I need it.  However, this one seems to be coming together really fast cuz I'm not hand-sewing it.  Also it's not made up of a million little pieces like Steph's quilt.

A while ago I mentioned that I had purchased some spelt flour to experiment with.  I made the spelt soda bread that I was telling you about.

It turned out okay, but I probably won't make it again.  It had kind of a grainy texture and tasted like bran cereal.  Not that that's a bad thing - I happen to like bran cereal.  But this bread was kinda dense; I like fluffier light breads. 

These were the ingredients in this recipe:

I couldn't find any sheep's yogurt so just used regular Greek yogurt.  But I think the dense texture came from the fact that it used ONLY spelt flour.    There are other recipes on websites that I can try that are supposed to result in lighter fluffier breads, so I will give some of those a whirl.  In the meantime, I am using the leftover spelt flour to mix into other recipes like cookies and pancakes, anything that uses plain ol' white flour - I like to mix in something healthier with it.

Well, that's about all I have to say for now.

Bossy says hello: