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It's January

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  It's January and as such we are in the middle of a really cold snap. Today is Thursday, on Saturday evening through Sunday...all day Sunday, we had winter precipitation in the form of freezing rain, sleet and finally snow. Right here in our area we didn't get hit as badly as areas north of us.  We only got maybe a quarter of an inch of ice coating everything, then sleet and snow on top of that.  But due to the temps, which have not been above freezing for several days now, there hasn't been much melting at all.  I took this picture yesterday morning on the way to town a long K Highway.  You can tell that the trees are still iced over, even after two days of partly sunny weather. Here's a shot of our trees taken yesterday morning.   Here's a cedar tree shot the day riafter the ice hit  It has been nice to finally get out and around, but this evening into tomorrow we are supposed to get anywhere from 2 to 4 inches of snow, maybe even more accumula...
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New Year Thanksgivings

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 At the moment; Sunday morning at about 7:30 AM, it is precipitating outside.  The temps are hovering around 32 degrees and what is falling sounds like rain.  We hope it IS rain and that it doesn't freeze on the roads.  Unless it warms up a few degrees we will probably skip church.  The temps are supposed to actually fall, not rise, so I don't want to risk not getting back up the hill. At the moment we are so thankful it isn't snow nor is it, so far anyway, a thick layer of ice.  We still have internet and electricity so there is much to be grateful for on this first Sunday of the New Year. Our little neighbor, Bonnie, who is 86 or 87, I forget which, maybe even 88, gave us a cat bed.  She said her cat didn't sleep in it.  As you can tell from the photo, Smudge and Chica are both enchanted with it.  Smudge loves it more than Chica does, and curls up in it often.  When Chica gets a notion though, she just pushes right in and eventually Sm...
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House of Howard Random News

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 Happy New Year 2025! Let's start of with some random blurbs of nothing important.  I ought to do a yearly recap.     I made my own sourdough starter this summer/fall, I forget when exactly.  This is half of a batch of sourdough crackers with rosemary and "Everything Bagel" seasoning in them.  These are really addictive.  Even Gary loves them and will snag one or two from the cracker jar throughout the day.  So far I have only tried one batch of sourdough bread.  It is rather time consuming to do a sourdough loaf the traditional way, because you have to do all of these "slap and folds" every half hour for 6 hours, or cold proofing or whatever confusing terminology might be next.  And if you put yeast in the bread that supposedly makes it "not real sourdough."  So I have been using up my starter and discard by making crackers whilst I work up the nerve and find the time to do a traditional sourdough loaf. The crackers are easy e...
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On Anthropomorphizing

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In past blog posts I likely have touched on this, but I am going to just go with it again because it amuses me. This past weekend Ellen's friend Daveigh stayed overnight.  That is her truck there behind our Kia, Optima.  I believe her truck is a Chevy Silverado.... obviously an older model.   Gary was talking with Daveigh about her truck.  She and her dad got it when she started driving and made it a project that they worked on together.  So Gary was asking her different things about it.  For one thing the other owner used a cheap spray paint to paint it red.  Since Daveigh doesn't have a garage or carport the red has faded into this dark pink color.  She intends to repaint it when funds allow.  In the meantime she has a pink truck.   Gary asked her if the truck has a name.  "Yes," she said. "Molly".  We laughed.  But only because we had named the Kia not long after we got it, around 9 or so years ago.  We b...
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Reflections on Cat Personalities

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In the 20 years I have been here on the farm we have had 3 cats: Matilda for 16 years, Smudge for almost 5 years and now Chica for just a month. This was Matilda.  Her mom was a stray who had her kittens behind a stack of old tires in Gary's red building. It was fun to watch Mama cat raise her kittens and teach them how to hunt.  She'd bring grasshoppers or frogs to them to teach them hunting skills. We gave away Matilda's siblings and Mama disappeared, much to my heartbreak.  Matilda was about 3 months old when her mom disappeared, but she kept her early hunting lessons close to heart.  She was an outside cat at heart.  She spent much of her time in the hay barn curled up high on the hay bales.  In winter she became an inside cat and loved to curl up in my lap, but come warm spring days she'd be outside and not come in for days.  I'd feed her on the porch.  But often she wouldn't eat what I left out because she caught her own.  We rarely had...
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Random Thoughts on a Random Shot

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  On the mornings when I am not feeling up to the climb back out of the creek bottoms, I take Bella down to the old sawmill on top of the hill and just let her run and chase squirrels and whatever rodents that are around in the piles down there.  I stand in a small flattened place and do exercises or just stand and pray.  This is my view looking slightly to the left of where I stand. The fold, ravine, holler, or whatever you would term it, between the two hills there leads down to a pond at the bottom of the ridge I am standing on. Years ago it never would hold water; it'd fill up during a hard rain, but it would drain in a few days.  It is holding water now, or had been.  We have been short of rainfall the past few months, since this past summer, so it is really low now.   The green field below is where Gary has been cutting hay every summer since he quit the dairy.  Depending on rainfall he will get anywhere from 15 to 30 bales of hay. ...
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Ellen. the Cats, Christmas, Clouds and Such

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 Much of this I have posted on Facebook, but I feel perhaps it bears posting in here as well, just for posterity's sake.   Ellen knows the gal who is the fill-in editor at the local newspaper, The Buffalo Reflex.  She gave Ellen the questionnaire to fill out for this little blurb they have every week. This came out last week.   Ellen actually got her picture in the paper twice last week.  Here is a closeup of the second one: Only Ellen, who was not scheduled to be on a float in the Buffalo Christmas parade, could end up with her picture in the paper for being on a float in the Buffalo Christmas parade.  We were standing there watching the parade when the OMB (Old Missouri Bank) float went by.  Her coworker there in the green sweater hollered at her to climb on, so off she ran and clambered onto the float.  Gary and I, when it was over, then had to follow the tail end of the parade over to the factory parking lot where it started so we could p...
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