Snow on the way!

It's Friday night and we are waiting for more firewood to be delivered, and a snow storm to start later this evening.  

After G's visit home and how hard he's been pushing himself in the few days since he came home he's happily glued to the couch with a book, and letting himself chill out a bit (with my encouragement of course)

The snow will be followed by another dip into deepest darkest Minnesota winter....they are calling for very cold temperatures next week.  Wait a minute--forgive the drama.  There is really nothing dark about winters here. They are bright and beautiful and more energizing than on the coast. They are just TOUGH.

This is why he's just a wee bit knackered:

This shows about 2/3 of the pile of two full cords of green un-split wood.  It's mostly oak.  Buying un-split turns out to be HALF the cost of split.  This will mostly be for next winter! It's still a big investment but well worth it. There is even a firewood shortage in Minnesota this year apparently.  We've  invested in a nice splitting axe, sledge, axe, corkscrew splitting wedge and a standard wedge.  None of which I know how to use yet...

If Oakley was trained up to do logging we pretty much have an open invitation to work on our neighbour's 80 acre wood lot...In due time I suppose. 

Christmas day snow sprinkle:

I had my TRC shift today and we were short staffed, so I was away almost all day.  Wish I could post the photo of the snowy owl I handled last week, and the one before that, but it's forbidden.  Today with only one clinician on staff we had fewer birds to check but three new arrivals.  An eagle with pretty obvious lead poisoning, a great horned owl with a shoulder fracture, and a saw whet owl that hadn't arrived by the time I left. I had a relatively calm rough legged hawk to pull for exam, so nothing nearly as strenuous as the snowy owls or some of the red tailed hawks recently.  I'm pretty tired too....It is hibernation season after all!

It was nice that G took care of the farm and I only had a few things to attend to in addition to evening duties, which he helped with.

This week we finished the roof insulation in the duck coop:

We made a duck perch for their run for the days it's too awful for them to range (and the two youngest ducks Panda and Pangolin really love to perch)(not shown here--it's a salvaged branched attached to two stumps--simple is good!)

We put up a nice big crab apple branch perch in the greenhouse off the front of the chook palace. It needed to be solidly anchored since it is heavy enough to kill anything it falls on.  We had a few stumps laying around and I mentioned to G some different types of enrichment you could offer using feeder stumps. While I was cleaning coops and topping up dry bedding he used the chainsaw to cut grooves in the stumps to put scratch and mealworms and alfalfa bits for the chooks and guineas to pick at. That was definitely a hit.  It was nice to feel like we were doing something good for them.

Fern is very pleased that G is learning to make goat cheese.
 Hopefully we will try it out this weekend and have good news to report.

Our computer room closet turned pantry and apothecary.  Soon we will add our own wine vinegars to this lot.  Every day G checks the growing mother of vinegar easily visible in the large glass jars and seems more and more pleased.  Sort of strange that a chemist by training is so interested in microbiology.

I signed up for a 'Beekeeping in Northern Climates' course offered by the department of entomology at the U of MN for late February.

I bet by the time I head out to the barn this evening for night check it will once again look like a northern climate....Hoping for some good accumulation so we can work with Oakley on the stone boat, and honestly I just love seeing them play in the snow. 

Our next photos won't be of Mud Bear, they will be of Bear Horse of the Tundra.