We got snow!

We got about 14 inches of snow on Sunday. Monday morning dawned bright and beautiful. I just love new-fallen snow before anyone has walked through it or plowed it. I took my camera and my dog and went for an early walk while it was still fresh. It was hard to really capture the beauty of it. Last fall, I decided to leave the sunflowers in my garden (above) for the birds. I also took this picture to show my Tennessee friend, Tammy, who is getting ready to plant her garden soon. I won't be planting for many months yet, Tammy. :)


We've had subzero temperatures for the past week, like much of the rest of the northern states in our country. It warmed right up with the snow storm... to about 13 degrees above zero on Monday morning. However, warm as 13 degrees might feel, it is still frostbite weather if you don't cover up the bare patches of skin.

This is Jagger, my walking buddy. There's a tennis ball deep inside that drooly mouth. It's his security object. He doesn't want me to throw it while we're walking, he just has to carry it. By the way, he's not old and gray around the muzzle, that's frost hanging from his whiskers.


Here, Whit's feeding hay out to the horses. I can't seem to get a picture of Scooby in action, but he will pick up that hay feeder, which is built out of 4x4's, by putting his head down under it and pushing it up with his neck so he can get leftover hay from underneath it.

My horses are pretty hardy guys. They prefer to stand out in the snow storm. Whit proved that by leading them into their shelter one night when it was snowing hard. They turned around and went out again. He led them in again. They insisted they didn't want to be there, and went galloping down the field, kicking up their heels and playing in the snow like a couple of kids. Okay, fine. Be that way. If you're happy, we're happy.

Our sheep don't care about having their picture taken. They're always more interested in the hay, which is somewhere in front of all those rear ends.

This is our 1890-vintage barn behind the big pile of snow Whit pushed up near the end of our driveway. TBear likes to make tunnels and forts in the piles. Yes, piles...plural. : )

More piles in front of the house. In case you're worried, TBear makes his snow forts from the yard-side of the snow piles.

A Quilter, A Fiddler, and Ireland

I taught both of my daughters to sew when they were in middle school, never dreaming that my quilting passion would be so contagious. (Although I have no idea why not. After all, our kids easily pick up our bad habits, why not good ones? :) My girls started out making dresses and baby quilts. Since then, both of them have made full-sized quilts, though Rissie tends to be a little busy these days with my very active grandson, and hasn't had much of a chance to get back to her sewing yet.

Nutmeg, on the other hand, has become quite the prolific quilter. Her first major project was a marvelous sampler quilt, which she created as a senior project. She did a beautiful job, and even entered it in a county fair, winning second prize. I'd love to inherit it some day...except that's backwards, isn't it. Oh well. Here's a picture of that sampler. She has a great picture of it on my bed. It looked very nice on my bed, Nutmeg, so when you get tired of looking at it, you can put it right back on again. :)

She has created quite a few quilts since then, and I definitely have my favorites. I'd like to share a few more of them before I tell you about my fiddler and Ireland. Nutmeg made me a beautiful wall hanging called a Carpenter's Wheel, which is pretty nifty given that her dad is a carpenter.

Another one of my favorites was a kind of marvelous memory quilt that Nutmeg created to commemorate her brother's tenth birthday. It is a bookcase with shelves full of jars containing various items special to TBear, his favorite books from that year, and other odds and ends. He loves his quilt as much as I do.

Here is a close up of some jars on the front. Note the jar with the fishing theme, and the one with the escaping butterflies on the shelf below it. The back of the quilt is black, and Nutmeg quilted neat things into the jars too. It's very cool.

Finally, the quilt Nutmeg recently finished piecing is the one I am hoping will help get TBear to Ireland in June, where he will play his fiddle with his teacher and her group of Pineland Fiddlers, and learn some Irish fiddle tunes too. Raffle tickets are being sold by the fiddlers. Not only will someone be blessed by Nutmeg's beautiful handiwork, but it will help defray the cost of traveling overseas. I'm not sure what a trip to Ireland is going to do to our haying season, but I guess we'll worry about that in June...

Nutmeg told me this rainbow-colored pinwheel quilt is her favorite...except for the gorgeous wedding quilt she's currently working on for a dear childhood buddy who is getting married in February. In case you're wondering what Nutmeg does in her spare time, she's working on getting a master's degree in secondary education.

Cats All Over the Place

I keep thinking Chloe, also fondly referred to as Fippo Kitty, is older than she really is, but 14 years old isn't exactly a spring chicken...or a spring kitten in her case. Chloe is shaped like a football. TBear couldn't say Hippo when he learned to talk, so he called her Fippo Kitty, and the name has stuck with her. She's pretty arthritic now and a little incontinent. Her favorite place to lounge is in the sunny doorway to our woodshed. Chloe's sister, Hannah, went missing last winter and is sadly presumed eaten by a wild animal. She always did have a little more wanderlust in her than Fippo has.

We arrived in Maine pulling a trailerload of sheep and goats with a carload of stuff, two cats, and a dog. Since we've lived here, we seemed to have acquired more cats. It was easy to do, really. Because all of our cats have become entirely outdoor barn cats, when one arrives needing a home, we just say, sure, what's one more? It does give me pause about taking in any more, however, every time spring and shot time rolls around. In fact, what's up with vets? They're a funny crowd, I've decided. They offer you a discount if you bring ALL of your animals to the clinic at the same time. I mean, do they really count the number of animals I have to bring (all at the same time) when they schedule my appointment?!?? You'd think they'd offer me a discount for NOT creating that kind of mayhem in their waiting room, but whatever. : ) Every spring, TBear and I round up the cats, load them into their carrying boxes, and put them in the car. Our dog, Jagger, is wonderfully dumb; he's just in it for the ride and happily leaps into the car any time we invite him to go anywhere, even to the vet. (On the other hand, I'm convinced cats understand a lot more English than dogs do...words like "vet" and "shots" can make all our cats simply vanish.)

These days we're down from seven to five cats, and as I said, they all live outside in the woodshed/barn. In the summer they all lounge around my sunny dooryard, sitting on the bench, the Adirondack chairs (whether we're in them or not), and on top of the the grill. They're great company when we finally sit and take a break at the end of the day. Actually, they're constant company anywhere we're working around the farm (unless you say those two magic words: vet and shots.) Two of them even follow me on my walks. They also do a great job of keeping the rodent population under control, though I did have to stop feeding the birds. For some reason my cats were confusing the birds with the rodents... the finks.

However, this week we've had unusually cold weather. Dangerously cold weather. Weather the humane society puts written warning notices about in the newspaper. Subzero-by-tens-of-degrees cold weather. I think my cats were tired of being barn cats, in spite of the lovely hayloft filled with hay that keeps everyone plenty warm enough. I was sitting in our schoolroom with TBear when I noticed this hanging from the screen outside on the window by my desk.

I'm thinking Burbank wanted to come in. It really was dangerously frigid even in the barn. So we let Burbank in. Then we let Chloe in. Then we let Schmitty in. Then Sammy...then Abby. I didn't want them all over the house, so we shut the door to the schoolroom and kept them in here with us. Jeepers, we have a lot of cats! We worked at the table with two lounging on the table, one on the windowsill, one under my chair, and one on TBear's lap. Then they'd get bored with napping in the warmth, because the average age of our cats, excluding Chloe, is really around 3 years old, so they'd start chasing each other and wadding up the rugs. It reminded me of a vet's waiting room run amok!

The weather has warmed up well above zero today, and it's snowing, so all the kitties are outside again. Thank goodness. Whit is in his heated workshop working on my kitchen cabinets. I think the cats are keeping him company today. It's a good place for them. I know Jagger is happy having his spot under my feet to himself again. : )

Kitchen Cabinets

We've lived in this house for four years now, so it seemed like a good time to start finishing the kitchen. I won't tell you how long it took to finish the last house we lived in...but that's past history. We're on a roll now, and that's all that matters. Like that "we"? Okay, Whit's on a roll now. When we bought our farm, our barn was storage for some beautiful cherry boards, which belonged to the previous owner. They sat in our barn for almost a year to the day, then the guy came and took them away. I had so hoped he would leave them for us so Whit could make kitchen cabinets from them, but he didn't. And that's okay. After all, they were his.

Recently, Whit got a really good deal on some cherry from a friend of his. It just so happened that the cherry he got had been traded (or sold?) to his friend...by the guy who had left it in our barn for a year! Three years later, it has come back to us. (I guess we can be sure it's dry now.) Whit decided he would completely finish one cabinet so he could make sure I liked it before he did the rest. I'm not fickle; I don't change my mind. I know exactly what I want, but we don't always communicate with each other as clearly as we think we do, so I guess it's a good idea. Or else he's just teasing me with one cabinet. :) Anyway, the first one has a beautiful cherry end on it, and I was so excited I took a picture of it. Look at that beautiful book-matched end! (I think that's what he called it.)

You can also sort of see what I've been living with for cabinets for awhile, so perhaps you'll understand my cautious excitement. I say cautious because I bought the hardware for just that one cabinet last night. I might run out of money before I get the rest of just this side of the kitchen done! Sheesh, hardware is expensive! I'll post pictures of before and after later, when Whit's done. Stay tuned!

Work and Play

The last snow storm we had just before Christmas gave us about a foot of snow. It warmed up for a few days and melted some of it, but not much, though the melt and freeze did turn our driveway into a nice skating rink. On New Year's Eve, it has been our custom for the past few years to go for a sled ride. Some day we'll have a sleigh, but for now, what we have really is just a sled, albeit a handy sled, to be sure. (Whit has the book of sleigh designs. What he needs now is free time to work on one.) Anyway, back to playing... Whit hooked our faithful old draft horse, Scooby, up to an old skid sled with the idea that they would go pack the snow down a little on the path before we took the sled out. What fun! It was sort of a cross between snowboarding and tobogganing. TBear and I went along for the ride. Check this out. (That's my spot behind Whit.)






The skid was actually too light to pack the snow much, but we had a great time!









Next, we harnessed Pat up with Scooby and took the sled out.














What a beautiful ride through the woods.






The last project of our Christmas break was to bring some more wood into the woodshed. It was a beautiful day today; beautiful being relative. It was actually bitterly cold and pretty windy, but the sun was shining. Whit hooked Scooby up to the wood sled and we spent a few hours hauling wood from our side lot and stacking it in the woodshed. We'll be set for a few more months now.

Happy New Year

Christmas vacation is winding down. In fact, we finally got to the point where TBear was a little bored one frosty, windy day. It was too frigid to play outside for long, and he'd already spent enough time on the computer playing flight simulator as a WW II ace, so I suggested he do a puzzle. TBear informed me that he really doesn't like puzzles, so I suggested he give another try at putting together a model of a B17 Flying Fortress that he'd started many months ago. Deciding it was too frustrating and difficult, he'd put it away again. This time he took off and really enjoyed working on it, and managed to finish it in a few days.
It sure looked like a puzzle to me when he was assembling it. :)
Didn't he do a great job?!