Dairy Daze...and Now Beyond

 It is a new year here for the House of Howard; as it is all over the world.  We, any of us here, rarely make resolutions.  It is just another year to live and love.  I usually set a few goals; center my life around my faith more, write more, both on here and for my writing group, declutter some more, buy less.  That is pretty much it. We do have a few plans for the new year.  Ellen will go back to uni here in a few days; I think her first day back is the 12th. I am going to concentrate, as I said, on writing, managing my alpha gal and histamine intolerance issues, and on gardening.  Last summer I pretty much failed at gardening for several different reasons, I just felt so awful from this syndrome. This year I am on a med for it, plus I am learning how to manage it.  I am also going to garden a bit differently...  But I digress.  Ellen and I are planning on going to California to visit family over Memorial Day weekend. We are hoping to ...

 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...

 A bright, happy New Year 2024 to all. This was a sunset from last year.  Last week actually.  I think it was the evening after the snow.  I wish I could get the little phone camera to capture the detail, but it was lovely any way.   An interesting note to this.  I belong to a Facebook group called "Love My Ozarks."  The point of the group is to share Ozark history and photos...etc.  But yesterday or day before the moderators announced that they are only going to accept so many sunrise/sunset photos from now on because so many of them were being submitted that it was messing with the algorithm somehow.  Maybe it was starting to only show people the sunsets and sunrises and not show any of the other posts.  In any case, there are over 50,000 members in that group and quite a few of them were offended, a couple even left the group because of it.  I thought it was sort of amusing that people would get so upset. Oh, wait.  Thi...