weekend

Saturday morning: 

Friday night we got many more inches of powder.

The annual challenge of keeping water available to everyone, everywhere, all the time, currently means carrying a lot of buckets, three times each day. While it's nice to have all these visits with the herd and the hens, it's a mystery why the (eventually) successful system of bucket de-icers and extension cords that worked last year is not working this year. I've got one more idea to try, but it involves a two-minute task in the crawlspace. It's genuinely quite spacious in there but even if I could still creep through a cellar window on my belly, working on the ground - and especially, getting back up off the ground - is not a simple matter these days, and it's possible I'd just have to do that two-minute task and then get used to living in the crawlspace.

But!

Yesterday my neighbor AM came by to take measurements for a plumbing line replacement that's been on the list for a few weeks, and we went to the hardware store for materials. He may be coming today to do the job, which will take place in the crawlspace. I already have my outlet adaptor and new extension cord ready for the crawlspace-based de-icer experiment. Fingers crossed!

~~~~~

 

the morning in snapshots

Morning windows: a late start today.

Didn't get outside til nearly 8!

East from the portico:

Joined by Team Intrepid:

Hard to get Violet in focus, as she moves toward me

the moment I get to the barn:

By contrast, Azalea stands her ground, waiting for me to open gates:

Mallow is content with his location...

...as is Della, when I come back in to make breakfast for the rest of us.

I hope your day has been lovely.

~~~~~

 

wordless wednesday

 

morning chores, 24th December 2025
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color

 

This isn't exactly the view I wake up to, because I wake up hours before daylight.

But it is the view from my bed, where I usually bundle back up and have breakfast after coming in from morning chores. Most days I have to bribe Della with treats to get my spot back; she appears out of nowhere and occupies the central location before I'm even out of the room.

Here's a closer look at the trees behind my workshop:

And here's how they look on a rainy day:

I love the richness and depth of colors on a gloomy day.

The rain is returning, so I must get out there and make sure everyone is set for the night.  Here's a little more color to peruse while I'm gone:

And...we're back to rain.

~~~~~

when you least expect it

A post about food.

Since discovering Extra Extra Coarse Bulgur a few years ago, it's been a staple in my pantry. I stopped cooking with rice; I find the bulgur has more flavor and texture, and holds up better to the freezing and reheating that are standard procedure here.

The tricky part: this particular bulgur - Duru Extra Extra Coarse - has only been available to me from the shop where I buy Turkish coffee, and I rarely have access to that shop because it is 45 minutes away. So when I do get there, I stock up on both coffee and bulgur.

Well, the last two times I borrowed a car and made the trek, there was no stocking up. The first time there was neither Extra Extra Coarse Bulgur nor Mehmet Effendi coffee on the shelves, and in fact the entire shop looked alarmingly thin in stock. The second time, months later, the shop was "Closed for Renovations." Uh-oh. I began rationing my last bag of bulgur. That's it, in the picture above.

Of course there was still plenty of neglected rice maturing in my cupboard, and a couple of months ago, by a happy chance, I saw a one-minute video about adding more food value to a bowl of white rice. The method also adds more texture and flavor, making this rice mixture a good substitute for the bulgur which had earlier become my substitute for rice. And because the person in the video was using a rice cooker, I tried using the Rice setting on my Gourmia pressure cooker. It worked beautifully. I think a regular pot would work just as well, though the timing might require testing.

Here is the mixture:

1 cup rice, 1/2 cup quinoa, 1/2 cup lentils, 3 cups water.

I've been using red lentils, and all sorts of combinations from half-empty bags of jasmine rice and arborio rice and plain old white rice. The result has more flavor and texture than plain rice, and if freezes and reheats well. Bonus: I finally have a genuinely interesting way to use that bag of quinoa that's been on the shelf for, well, quite a while.

Also it looks rather festive, especially made with tri-color quinoa:

Extra Extra Coarse bulgur would still be my first choice but until

Oh my gosh. Weirdly coincidental newsflash: my Occasional Helper just emailed a news clipping. No details, unfortunately, but the shop where I bought bulgur and coffee from Turkey now has a "for rent" sign on the building. Big sigh. It was a family-owned  business for 20 years. I can only hope the owners and employees are all landing on their respective feet.

I may be making and eating this rice mixture for a while.

Glad I found it.

Let me know if you try it.

~~~~~

update

Creeping toward a more functional (digital) state, here. It's been one step forward, two steps back, but today I received one more piece of phone-ordered paraphernalia (a replacement wifi dongle) and now - dare I say it? - it may just be a matter of getting everything set up again on my old laptop. I can only do an hour or so at a time, and there's a lot of seasonal tasking requiring my time these days, but Winter is coming and everyone needs an indoor hobby, right?

One piece of Plain Good News: that automatic back-up system I've been paying for the past few years has earned it's keep. It took a week of non-stop uploading to transfer the saved files back to the laptop and external hard drive, but now I think I've got them all and it's a matter of reinstalling apps and software, finding the restored files, and putting them "away" again. Here's the scale of this housework:

Even though this is a pretty dull blog post, I want to try to publish it because it will mean I can access and post from the old laptop again. Fingers crossed. Here goes.

~~~~~

morning chores for lily and violet

Note: I am still working on a borrowed laptop and cannot upload images or access the thousands of images stored on my broken laptop. But I found some draft posts stored in blogger, and a few have images already in place, so I'm posting this one composed in December 2013. Greetings from Memory Lane.

~~~~~

 

We all have our little tasks to do in the morning.

Today it was raining lightly, so breakfast was served in the little goat barn for the younger does.

"Please don't make us eat in the rain. Rain makes us sad."

Lily of the Valley assesses the overall quality of the hay by doing the crucial face-test, while Violet takes the single-stem approach for a finely-tuned analysis:

I guess it passed the test!

There's something about listening to animals eat.  It's just pleasant, I don't know why.

And if one is used to the steady and rhythmic

munch.

munch.

munch.

of horses, the sound of goats, with their equally steady but more rapid

munch,munch,munch,munch,munch

is very smile-producing.

Really, goats in general are very smile-producing, as many of your comments have indicated.

I am so happy you are enjoying the goats  :)

But hark!  Violet suddenly stops munching, and is all alertness.

It is the morning school bus, which picks up a gaggle of young children at the corner, about 400 feet downslope from the goat barn.

One of Violet's tasks is to supervise the loading and departure of the bus every day.

(Except weekends, of course.  Everyone deserves time off.)

Here they come.

There they go.

My work here is done.

Got any peanuts in that pocket?

~~~~~

many words few snaps

 

The White Rabbit put on his spectacles. `Where shall I begin, please your Majesty?' he asked.
`Begin at the beginning,' the King said gravely, `and go on till you come to the end: then stop.'                                              

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll

Writing a blog post after a gap is tricky, because I've got to start somewhere. Every couple of days in July and August (until my laptop died and doing anything online became a faint memory) I started to compose a post, then thought I'd "better wait" until something: an interesting discovery, an item checked off the task list, a happy event. If not a Beginning, I wanted at least a Middle and an Ending. And I was determined not to write about the relentlessly unpleasant weather, because it was already getting far too much airplay in my head every single day.

Yet here I finally am, on a borrowed laptop, writing about weather, because...it's raining today, and it rained yesterday, real rain, hours of rain, for the first time in many weeks. Huzzah!

I am choosing to look at this rainy weekend as an Ending to a very long, too-hot, too-dry, too-humid Middle. So I am writing. Trying to write. Is anyone reading? If so, please wave in the comments. It's been a lonely Middle.

In retrospect, there was a lot of repair work undertaken in July and August, much of it physical, some of it planned. Time spent with the eye surgeon, the dentist, the veterinarian. There were basically two kinds of challenges: expected and unexpected. Here's one example:

Expected challenge: cataract surgery in July. I did as much prep as I could, because I knew there would be several weeks of post-surgical limitations such as never leaning down and never lifting anything over 15 pounds.

Unexpected challenge: not having my Occasional Helper here at all during the cataract recovery period to do any of the necessary leaning and lifting. (Actually, he's been unavailable through much of the Spring and Summer, for various unforeseen reasons.) In desperation - and having a strong inclination to keep my goats alive - I called friends who sent their own Helper over one afternoon to shift feed sacks for me. Bonus: now I've met someone else I can hire - when available between his other jobs - as a backup to the Occasional Helper. So there's a Happy Ending of sorts.

Violet waiting for someone - anyone - to move feed sacks. 

A few days before the eye surgery my neighbor AM came with his tractor for the next step in a project that's been in the works for over a year: a new Very Raised Bed built along the landing at the top of the driveway. Starting way back with the barn salvage in April 2024, a lot of work had gone into the new bed, constructing the lower layers of timber, brush, and shavings. But the top layer was to be the decomposing hay and manure that I've been curating for several years under one of the goats' roundtops. The decision to rebuild the barn meant that this roundtop could be dismantled, and AM and his tractor could scrape up load after load of that enriched material and carry it over to the landing. That was a mucky, sweaty, dirty job, but the day before my surgery I was out watering and planting that new raised bed. Late for planting? Yep. Planted anyway. Winter squash and sunflowers. And since planting=leaning, it had to be finished before the surgery. This has been a dreadful year for gardening, and if there was even a chance of seeing something green and growing, I was not going to let it pass for lack of effort. This was the kind of Ending that is also a Beginning.

squash blossom just before the rain yesterday

How is everything in your neck of the woods?

I hope your July and August have been lovely.

~~~~~

dispatch from the trenches

 

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mornings

 

The best time to take photographs these days is 5:30 in the morning. This is also the best time to hang up the bird feeders, refresh the water troughs, trim a set of hooves, cart a hay bale out to the paddocks for distribution, and switch gates so that all the goats have a fair crack at the hay for a couple of hours, without fisticuffs. 

I confess I don't always have a tremendous amount of get up and go at that time of day, but knowing full well how much more uncomfortable it will be a couple of hours later, I generally get out there and do it.

Not everyday though. That's why today the picture above was taken closer to 9:00 AM, after a late start on chores, with sweat dripping off the ends of my hair and bouncing off my eyelashes. I felt a bit more like this day lily:

Still colorful though, right?

Stay cool, friends.

~~~~~

special delivery

I get a lot of deliveries. Without a vehicle, it's the only reliable way to Get Stuff Here. Some of the drivers will bring packages to the top of the driveway, which I very much appreciate. But I don't blame the drivers who choose to leave packages at the bottom of the driveway, and that's why there's a little plastic lawn chair visible from the road. In the Winter, I leave a sled down there.

Walking down the driveway to pick up a package, I spotted this:

I believe it's a foxglove, which I don't recall ever seeing here before.

Exciting stuff! 

Especially since it's in a place where the animals are not, so I don't have to try to transplant it to avoid accidental poisoning.

And so interesting:

This morning I also walked up the road a hundred feet or so, to check on a little patch of columbines in front of my Upper West Side paddock. Some years I've seen two or three colors of columbine there, but this year I saw only one color - a lovely purple. Today there are just three blossoms remaining, Here's one:

I hope you've got some flowers blooming wherever you are.

~~~~~

batch batch cooking

Tortellini pressure-cooked in sauce, ready for freezer.

I've been doing "batch" cooking for nearly as long as I've been cooking, because it always made sense: make the effort (and the mess) once, eat well, and have a few servings tucked in the freezer for another day. When I started using a "multi-cooker" - mine is a Gourmia brand, not the famed Instant Pot - I also started cooking batches in a sequence, with two or three things different things cooked over the course of an afternoon or even a couple of hours. For example, the first thing could be plain pasta, followed by a pot of bulgur, followed by winter squash or a pot of soup.

The speed of pressure cooking is what many people seem to focus on, and it's true that once you've waited several minutes for the pressure to come up, the actual cooking times are almost incredibly short and presumably energy-efficient compared to other methods. But a major advantage for me is the kind of attention needed: intermittent.  Compared to cooking in a regular pot on the stove, there isn't any hovering or stirring or keeping an eye on. This frees up bits of time for little tasks, such as slicing apples for the herd or dealing with a sliding pile of mail or folding the laundry. I'm still in the kitchen but  getting extra things done in addition to restocking the fridge and freezer. It makes the entire cooking endeavor feel more efficient and productive, and I love that.

Speaking of pasta, have I mentioned my new favorite shape? After decades of rotini fandom, a trip through the Aldi markdown aisle a couple of years ago led me to cavatappi:

And because I rarely have the chance to shop in Aldi, I bought a few boxes. By the time I'd worked out the best way to cook cavatappi in the Gourmia I had also created a new way to eat pasta: with a spritz of oil, a dollop of salsa, and a sprinkling of shredded sharp cheddar melted in. I've been cooking this pasta for two years now and have yet to put pasta sauce on it.

After running out of the Aldi boxes, I started looking for cavatappi online and couldn't find it anywhere. It seemed impossible, so I visited the Barilla website and started scrolling through pictures of their many pasta products. Behold:

Here's what cavatappi or cellentani looks like when it's been pressure-cooked for 3 minutes, then frozen, then thawed:

This week, in the interest of eating cold things, I've branched out from my usual salsa and cheddar method, and used the thawed pasta for a salad with tuna and mayo. If I'd had celery or frozen peas or corn, they would have gone in also, but it was good anyway. So good. This form of pasta just seems perfect to me: thick enough to have a good chewing texture but hollow, so not overly dense. Spiraled and ridged to hold whatever is added - salsa or mayo or even just butter. If you like rotini, I strongly recommend trying this. Hot or cold. Except today. Today is definitely a day for more cold pasta salad, at least here in Massachusetts.

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more

Sambucus watching the rain from a cozy nest in the Peace Pavilion.

Another rainy night and day. So dark in the house that lamps are needed to see the other end of a room. Since morning chores it's been an indoor day, with my main responsibility being toweling off Moxie and Della every time they come in after brief forays in the saturated underbrush.

The barncams pay for themselves in terms of safety every single day, and on a rainy day (or night) they save me many uncomfortable trips just to check on the herd. Plus there's the entertainment value. After moving the cameras around from the laptop to check on every goat, usually from an overhead angle, it's always fun to suddenly have a face pop up right at lens-level.

Violet on her bench of choice.

Sorry to keep on and on about the rain.

It's the element underlying everything else here at the moment.

~~~~~

garden snaps

 The "Egyptian onions" or "walking onions" are on the move at last.

It took several years to get these established here, despite their mint-like reputation for vigorous spreading. This year they are looking very healthy, and are already dropping their heads to the ground to create more plants.

Two varieties of pole beans are starting to come up.

Some of the plants have already been destroyed by an unidentified critter.

Very unfortunate.

Also unfortunate is that something got into the terrace garden in the last 48 hours and munched off the top couple of feet of many of my thornless raspberry plants, which I've spent years encouraging. Based on the height of the browse line it almost has to be deer damage, which has never been an issue here before.

In happier news, there are a few more spiderworts blooming up by the barn:

And for everyone who has been sharing pictures of their tomato plants, here are some of mine, seeded directly into one of the tall metal beds back on the 19th of May:

Hang in there, little tomato plants!

This last one is not really a garden picture, but under the category "Reasons to Carry a Hand Lens" here is Prunella vulgaris, the very common little "heal-all" plant, growing along one of my paths between paddocks and house:

I hope your gardens are doing well.

~~~~~

update

Lately we've been having rain.

Lots of rain.

For everyone whose gardens or lawns are going totally wild:

I see you.

Most of this happened in one week:

 But! This week we had a forecast of three days in a row with only a minimal chance of rain - yesterday was the third day - and I've tried to make a bit of progress on the many seasonal tasks that are way behind schedule. Not just because of the weather. My Occasional Helper has been unavailable for many of his Tuesday/Thursday visits lately. This means that when he does come, the priority is just the heavy lifting that's piled up; not the seasonal tasks. I'm glad he gets here at all, of course, and he has often stepped up for an unforeseen or unusual task, even if not on his regular workdays, which I'm very, very grateful for. But my gosh, am I ever feeling this gardening season slipping away from me. It's already too late for some of my carefully planned projects, and I've reached a point in my life where "I'll have to get to that next year" doesn't sit well.

Oh well, all I can do is all I can do, and today I am planting beans before the rain that's expected this afternoon, so there's that!

Thank gods for the perennials planted over the years, like this amsonia. It grows naturally in a tidy clump which has helped it remain upright despite all the rain.

My spiderwort plants, which do not grow in a tidy clump but rather seem to fling themselves all over the garden, have been sadly flattened by repeated rainstorms, despite my efforts to prop them up. Yesterday I was thinking there might not be any spiderwort flowers this year, but then I happened upon this one, supported by surrounding tall stalks of tansy. I'll bet that tiny bee was relieved to find at least one flower where there are usually dozens:

And here's some of the "wild lettuce" which seems to weather anything, and also seems to grow a foot overnight. I'm taking it out near the gardens because each plant produces roughly 2 billion windborne seeds and it spreads like crazy. I'd never heard of letting goats eat this - and it's got a very sticky sap - but another goat person, my long-time blogpal Leigh, saves this plant to use as a component of her homegrown goat feed, so I'm going to try drying some this year. (Are you here, Leigh? Please check me on this!)

Celebration time: yesterday Moxie and I put up the little screentent again. Now there's a chaise that the biting bugs can not - for the most part - reach. Huzzah!

Since the return of rain is predicted, last night after chores I brought in everything I had dragged outside to air during the Three Magical Days of Dryness. Including all seven drawers from an old wooden dresser. Anything stored in that dresser always smells musty to me, no matter what I've tried. If anyone can suggest a way to get musty smells out of old wooden furniture, please, please share that knowledge! I don't have many storage options in the house, and I don't want to have to turn that dresser into a workshop tool box.

~~~~~