Blogging

 Still plenty of snow around. This is at my parents' farm.

So, I was looking for the date when I had some work done on the house. Not having any luck, I start skimming through my blog and found it in 2011. Now that I've looked through some of those past years I realize how valuable it is to have memories written and photographed. Frankly, my memory is not great. I already knew I have trouble with remembering when something happened; now I see I forget lots of details as well. One post I mention watching a movie...I have zero recollection of ever having seen it; if asked I would have denied it. A little scary.

With that said, my plan is to bump up the frequency of posts. Not so much to burden any visitors with the minutia of my life, but so I have reminders of what happened.

Random

Just sitting here, I suddenly remembered a new boy coming to class in the fourth grade. Teacher says something like 'welcome, Nick' and the boy replies 'I prefer to be called Nicholas'. Funnily that must have been the most notable thing he did because I don't know how long he was at my school and have no other memories of him.

It is interesting what actually sticks around in our memories.

Gah

This was my Mount Everest. I shoveled past all the other drifts, but needed to get through this one to reach the chickens.

My face is frozen and my back hurts, but I reached the chickens!

The wind patterns were so strange. In over thirty years, I've never had drifts like these in the back yard. Especially with so little on the driveway. I have a smallish electric snowblower, but it can't handle wind-packed snow or uneven terrain. 

About thirty starlings and some sparrows in the coops.

Have you ever been so pooped there was no energy left to feel accomplishment?

All caught up

This is the last unfinished needlepoint project finally finished. Funny side story: when I was adding the details I realized I had lost all the brown threads and ended up using embroidery floss instead. Then, after I hung it up...I found the missing browns in the bottom of my yarn bowl. I do have tendency to forget where I've put things.

Annoyingly, I've developed a stress fracture in my foot that is making life difficult.

Yum?

I was whipping up some cream cheese frosting and decided to compare my usual recipe with the online favorites. The only difference was I use 1.5 c of powdered sugar compared to 3 or 4 c in all the others. So I tried it with 3 c... yuck! I couldn't taste the cream cheese at all (so what's the point?) I ended up adding another block of cream cheese and that worked fine. Although I now have a LOT of frosting. Ha.

One of my front doorstep plants shows appreciation for moving inside for the winter.

The first geranium from seed is flaunting pretty colors.

Needlepoint framed and ready to hang.

Winter?

Because everyone needs a little chaos in their lives, I adopted these two farm kittens, Solo on the left and Fury. You know that thing about cats being independent? These two always want to be in the same room as me. 2:00 a.m. play session has to be on my bed.

Fury has issues with being picked up. He goes full tornado mode, claws and teeth. No, the nape of the neck doesn't work on him. So, I don't pick him up, but I am slowly subverting him and he climbed into my lap for the first time yesterday!

These are my outside plants, brightening up the basement for the winter.

I read an interesting BBC article on the effects of cooler houses on people. Basically, anything below 64F and the body starts to work to protect the internal organs. They took it down to 50F since that's what UK houses would settle at without heating on average.

At that point blood flow to the brain is down 20%, blood pressure, breathing rate and heart rate go up. It's why there are more strokes and heart attacks in winter. 

Of course, living here not having heating would be a lot worse than 50F. Normally, I aim for high 50s, but this winter I'm going to up that to a 64F minimum.

New to me

I had a visitor on my garage a couple days ago. I've never seen one here before so pretty exciting. 

Today I see she left behind another generation.