Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

   Today's date is January 18, 2025. I actually started this blog entry on January 11th.  But I haven't had the heart to finish it.  I will let it stand as it is and continue on down below with an update. To put it mildly January 2025 stinks. January 11, 2025    ...just so many thoughts and memories. For the past 2 days or so I have pondered what to write in this post, and having sat down and opened this page to actually write..well, I have been sitting here for quite some time, not knowing where to start. So I will just throw some garbled thoughts onto the blank screen here and hope that you can catch the gist and make sense. My sister-in-law, Deb, passed away 2 days ago; January 9, 2025.  She had been battling ovarian cancer for the past...almost 3 years I believe it had been.  There is much that could be said there about her battle and the ups and downs of it.  But what is most important about it is that throughout it all, the treatme...

  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...

 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...

 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...