Happy winter solstice! I am really looking forward to longer days.
For four and a half years, I’ve been participating with a Flickr group called “A day in the life” where at every change of the season you document your life in photos. It’s a very cool project and it feels very normal to me now to anticipate it every three months. My collection of sets is here.
My day was pretty relaxed. We got a small amount of snow overnight which the dogs loved. It was just enough to make everything pretty and not enough to need to shovel or plow, so that was nice. After giving everyone food and water, I passed out some hay as well. The chicken coop was starting to smell of ammonia so I spread a full bale out in there which made it much better. Soon I will be willing to let them out, but not yet. I want them bonded to that coop and it’s surrounded by trees which will really tempt them, so I’m being overly cautious, I know. Maybe this weekend when Frank is here.
I spent a lot of time in the kitchen. I got a good start on the grapefruit marmalade. I was really careful to remove as much pith as possible and I boiled the peelings three times, tossing the water after each and rinsing well. Hopefully that will make the overly bitter flavor go away and get rid of any chemicals used to grow them, since they weren’t organic. It’s got to sit in the icebox overnight, and I’ll boil it up and can it tomorrow.
I baked off the loaf of sourdough bread I started a couple of days ago. I left it to do a really slow rise of 48 hours in the icebox and it seems to have worked nicely. It got all nice and puffed up with only the sourdough starter, no extra regular yeast. I wonder how the flavor will change now that I’m in a new place? It will be interesting to find out what the wild yeast in this house are like.
By the end of the afternoon, the wind had really picked up and it was raining hard, making doing the evening chores sort of sucky, slip sliding in the mud. We have a really wicked hill right by the house that you have to climb to reach the chicken coop or back of the house, and I must have fallen at least three times today. I’m going to need to figure out a better way up and down that hill. Despite the wind and rain, did the turkeys go into the nice dry barn? No, of course not.
All day long, Tara and Gaela have been getting into all sorts of trouble, both inside the house and out. Tara wasn’t too pleased with her first snow, but after a while, she and Gaela just chased each around the house, and Tara is still so little that she finds cracks in the stone foundation of the house to hide in. I can always tell where because Gaela’s head will be in the hole and her tail wagging madly. Inside the house, the game of the day was for Tara to get in a box and Gaela would drag it around. I never could catch it on the camera but here’s a bit of them playing otherwise.