They're Baaack

Well, it finally happened.  I've been in this house on this mountain for just over a year, and I've finally seen my first bear.  Live and in the flesh.  Thanks to the dogs Moxie and Beau.  Yes; the bears are back.

Moxie needs to learn that once the bear is a hundred yards off and still moving away, the alarm needs to stop.  She also needs to learn to come down off of "High Alert" once the bears have passed; that now everything that moves in the dark is not a potential threat.  We do need some sleep.

I know Twyla tends to write more about the animals than I do.  But today is one of those times I'll give you a break from the theological and the political.  And yes, I consider that last post in the political realm because ideas do have consequences.  I thought a lot about posting a follow up piece on that post below of the young moonbat below because I think it's important for people to understand why that presentation is so outrageous.  My, oh my, have I digressed from talking about bears.

If I remember right, it was between 02:00 and 03:00 that we were awakened to the sound of Moxie barking inside the house.  Beau was, of course, outside the house and barking.   This can not mean anything good.  Beau almost never barks.  Not at passing cars.  Then again; what passing cars?  One neighbor and a mailman.  When the UPS driver or FEDEX delivers, Moxie goes nuts.  Beau just hangs back and stays quiet, but looks intimidating.  If Beau is barking that alarm type bark, something is worth investigating.

I grab my trusty flashlight and head for the back door.  Out flies Moxie, that high pitched howling bark piercing the air.  My eyes still mostly acclimated to the dark, before I can even turn on the beam, I see a large shadow on the slope behind the house, barely twenty feet off the corner where our bedroom is.  He's going up the worn path that Moxie likes to run up into the tree line.  When the beam of my flashlight hits him, he stops to look at where it's coming from and I see those big green eyes that God designed to give such mammals the most amazing night vision that we could only dream of having.

He quickly decides it's time to move on and reaches the trees up above and I can see by how many trees he covers with the length of his body that he's a biggun'.  Gotta be 300 pounds at the least.  Probably more, but I don't want to sound like I'm embellishing this story.  Had I had my wits about me, I would have stepped into the office and grabbed my camera off my desk and maybe taken a picture.  But who thinks that well when they've been awakened from a sound sleep at that hour?

And poor Twyla was so tired from the days hard work, she wasn't about to get out of bed, so she missed seeing her first bear.

I am quite glad that this North American black bear was more afraid of me than I was of him.  I'm glad he was afraid of my two dogs. (Even though Beau is still in contract negotiations).  A good dog is a great thing to have as a living burglar alarm, as long as you properly train them.  Oh yeah, and I'm really glad trash collection happened earlier that afternoon.

Life in the mountains can have its exciting moments.  I'll try to get a picture next time.  Thanks for stopping by.

Shalom

Snug At Home

I want to hit on several things.  There is no single theme to this post.  It's kind of a "what-I've-been-up-to-the-past-twenty-four-hours-and-I-need-practice-hitting-the-hyphen-key-with-my-ring-finger" post.

Had to brave it down the mountain yesterday in spite of all the ice, because Twyla's prescriptions were in and she was out of one of them. Yes, we slid a couple of times and it was scary.  But the positive side was the fact that we got a couple of great shots.  To wit:

Near the road on the way in to our part of the mountain they built a little decorative water wheel.
It left no doubt that it was cold.

We do have to venture outside to feed and water the chickens, and I have to spend a bit of time out there collecting more wood for the stove.

This is a great time to be experimenting with cooking exclusively with the wood stove.  The other morning we baked potatoes inside it. Wrapped in aluminum foil and nestled just above the coals. They were done to perfection in about 45 minutes.

Twyla got a craving for corn bread, so she mixed up a batch and poured it into the cast iron skillet and set it atop the stove.  There's a cast iron lid that fits both the skillet and the dutch oven that she put on top.  It cooked through well enough, but the top didn't get very brown.  That's just fine.  I suppose had we pre-heated the lid on top of the stove first, it might have been different, but the cornbread came out with a fluffy, cake-like texture that was awesome, with darker brown crispier bottom.  It was delicious.

If you are a follower of Twyla's blog, you may remember her writing about our great frugality and regular visits to the various thrift stores around here.  You just never know what you might find.  About a week or two ago, I spotted an ice cream maker for $6 at the Humane Society thrift store.  Had to get it.  There's just something about homemade ice cream.  Besides that, I just love experimenting with recipes.  So, I made a batch, but it was more like ice milk, even though I did add some whipping cream to it.  We went through that pretty quick with both cranberry relish and blackberry cordial.

This morning, I woke up at 02:00.  The fire had gone out and so I had to rebuild it.  Of course, by the time I did all that, I was wide awake.  What to do.  What to do.  Make more ice cream.  I bought more heavy whipping cream yesterday, so why not?  Let's improve the recipe.  Less milk and more cream in the ratio.  Two extra tablespoons of sugar compared to the first batch.  Three fresh egg yolks.  The high lecithin content is a fantastically smooth emulsifier.  I thoroughly pureed all the ingredients with the stick blender (that is one of my all time favorite kitchen tools!) put it in the maker and put it outside to run.  Hey, it was 14° F out there at 02:45, so I figure I can just put the inner container in the bucket and let it run. No ice, no salt.  Makes sense, right?

Moxie tries to herd Brewster

Meanwhile, I decided to take some store bought, whole wheat flour that somebody gave us for the dog, and make up some dog treats.  Old leftover chicken bouillon cubes, left over saved chicken fat (yes, we really don't waste anything) little salt, enough sugar to feed some yeast and I've got my basic dough.

Time to check the ice cream.  All that had happened was the liquid mixture had gotten pretty cold, but it was still very much liquid after 40 minutes.  Fail.  You apparently do need the ice and salt slush to supercool the ingredients while the paddle scrapes the sides. I go grab the spatula and the rock salt and fill the bucket.  Back to the biscuits.  What's a quick easy way to cut or shape them?  Hmmm.

By the time I had the first batch of dog treats ready to come out of the oven, Twyla is up and had come out to the fire to have her first cup of coffee.  She opens the oven to see what I'm cooking and starts laughing.

Yum, yum.  Moxie treats.

"They look like little turds!"

"I thought that it was quite appropriate for Moxie.  After all, she likes chicken poop."

More laughter.  Yep.  Doesn't matter how many times I scold her, when I move the chicken arks, Moxie is right there looking for a choice morsel.  This is why I think people who are lured into spending incredible amounts of money on "gourmet" or special blends of dog food have more money than sense.  How discriminating of taste can one be when one licks its own butt?

These little gems for the dog have a texture kind of like a scone.  Maybe we could call them "scurds?"

I only made one tray like that out of three, because it's much easier to roll out a flat ball of dough and then cut it into strips and then cross cut into little rectangles.  I didn't want to spend all morning on this project.

"I know how to be a lady!  Psst! Got any scurds?"

From looking at the weather forecast, we have most of this day's light to secure lots of firewood to a covered location, but then after dark we are due to get a lot of snow.  I just hope that the temperature stays well below freezing so that it does fall as snow and not as rain to then become a glaze of ice.

If we get snowed in again tonight, I'll have to come up with something else really clever to do.  Maybe it's time that I tried baking a loaf of bread on top of the wood stove with a makeshift aluminum foil tent.

I really am hoping for that six inches of snow so I can slide down the driveway.

Before I go, Twyla has created a new page on her blog to showcase her beautiful watercolors.  So make sure you head over to Green Acres and check them out.  It's in the sidebar titled Twyla's Watercolor Gallery.  In addition, Twyla has decided to create a second blog that has to do with her little fun experiment in Bible study.  Go check out My 316 Notes.  You might find it interesting.

Thank you for stopping by my blog, especially the persons in Moscow, Russia, and Stuttgart, Germany; whoever you are.

Cat-astrophe

The cat is missing.  He went AWOL.

Here we thought he was trying to get in our good graces and try to stay inside more often, and now we haven't seen a patch of white fur in a while.  Last I saw of Casspurr, he bounded up the mountainside to the road that is about two stories above and behind the house.  That was three days ago.  I've seen neighbor's cats in the backyard, but no Casspurr.

The last night he spent inside, he bothered Twyla all night long.  Sleeping on top of her, chewing on her hair, walking around on the bed.  It was awful.  Then HE decides that he's gonna sleep all day on the quilt at the foot of the bed.  Every time I needed to back to the bedroom and saw him there I would poke him and tell him to wake up.

Maybe he got ticked off about that.  Maybe someone up the road attracted him with kitty treats.  Twyla said she's had cats who "two-timed" her.  That makes sense to me, since nobody really owns a cat.  Dogs have masters, cats have staff.  Then there's the phrase, "Cattin' around."

Dogs I understand.  Dogs are loyal.  I once had a tee shirt that said, "Lord, help me to be the kind of man my dog thinks I am."

Maybe Casspurr just couldn't stand competing for our attention with this new dog Moxie.  Moxie never seemed like a threat to Casspurr, and only seemed to want to play.

Maybe he just wants to run free for a while and will show up after he's grown tired of whatever it is he's into at the moment.  Twyla thinks a predator probably got him.  I hope not.  He is definitely at a disadvantage for two big reasons.  He has no front claws and he's stark white.  And even though he has proven how tough he can be with the local cats, something bigger and meaner is another story.

I hope he surprises me and shows up begging for one of us to pop open a can.

Not Enough Hours

It seems like there are never enough hours in the day.

Our Shabbat Table

I apologize to my faithful readers for not posting enough.  You would think that when you get up between 4 & 5 (and sometimes earlier) and don't hit the rack until 21:00 or later that you could fit a blog post in somewhere.  On Thursday I posted because it was Rosh HaShanah, but on Friday we were preparing to have guests; Twyla's  great friend and her family came up on Shabbat and spent the night and most of the day on Sunday.

I wanted our guests to have a good time, so pretty much everything centered around that.  Shabbat was a pretty rainy day, and I'm glad I put off setting up the tent in the yard, because even though the tent is big and comfortable, slogging through a wet yard would not have been fun, and our guests seemed to enjoy "camping:" out in the house.

We played a couple of games, but I think the most fun was when I created some "madlibs."  Remember those?  You take a story (I make one up) but you leave blanks for things like verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and then you get people to randomly give them to you and fill in the blanks and then you read the story.  I think I did three or four and we laughed 'til we had tears in our eyes.  Now it makes me want to create a bunch more for the future, and Twyla wants to do the same with some well known songs.

A new family member

Moxie and Ryan

We had talked about the benefits of having a dog.  Here in the mountains with all of the predators it's not a bad idea to have a natural alarm.  Casspurr doesn't really bark at anything.  But we weren't about to just rush out and find any old dog.  As if to remind me of how important this might be, it was less than a week ago that a rather large brown rabbit went strolling through the back yard, setting off alarm bells in my head over my precious seedlings of lettuce and cabbage and herbs for the winter.

As providence (not luck) would have it, Twyla's long time friend had told her they were trying to find a new home for a stray that they had picked up, a labrador/boxer/something mix that was sweet, but a little high strung.  So we told them to bring her with them and we would see what happens.  Moxie was and is, definitely full of energy.  I took her for a walk on the leash to do an assessment, and she began understanding what I expected pretty quickly.  So quickly, in fact, that the mom was amazed.  She said what a lot of people say, "Moxiedrags me."  But it's just a matter of technique and establishing quickly who is in charge.

Moxie wants to learn

Here we are on Tuesday, and Moxie understands where the property line is.  She stays pretty much around either the front deck or the back steps.  That's right, after the first night she figured out that this is now her home.  She moves to the front or the back based on where she hears or sees us moving.  After just a little admonishment, she now knows not to rush on, or pester the chickens.  The leash means we get to go quite a distance from the house and that's a real treat and she now almost perfect heels on the walk, meaning she walks at my pace, no matter how fast or slow, on my left side.  She has "sit" down pat, and we are still working on "stay".  I can drop the leash and move up to twenty feet away now.  Her attention span will get longer with each passing day.
I estimate that within six months, I will be able to take her on walks without the leash and she will be totally controllable on voice command alone.

She started out barking for attention, not used to being kept outside. I've done inside dogs for years [not my choice], but I'm not doing that ever again, especially not in a farm situation. But with firm and consistent training over a few hours, she figured out that I wasn't going to tolerate that.  Now, if she starts to try that, I can simply call her to the door, grasp her around the snout and say, "NO BARK" and she remembers for hours.  I had to get up at midnight last night because she started in, but all it took was that one technique and she was quiet the rest of the morning.  Now, there is a fine line.  She needs to know that she is not to bark at us for attention, but that it's okay to bark at strangers or strange animals coming into the yard.  You have to know the difference in the sound of the dog's bark.

I took Moxie for a ride into town for a couple of errands.  She's a bit nervous about riding in the truck.  No sticking her head out the window.  She just lays on the bench seat and loves it every time I stroke her.  Her body language seemed to be: "I don't really care for riding in this contraption, but if it means I get to be close to you, I'll do it." Maybe that will change over time.  We'll see.

Overall, I think this has been a win-win situation for everybody.  It will be fun to see the reaction of Moxie's former family when they come for another visit.  I may not be Cesar Milan, but I come pretty darn close.  Twyla's comments and photo are over on her blog.  She's never been a "dog person," but she's going to be. ;)