Autumn

As you can see, our sunflowers have come a long way since the last blog post! Slow as they started, we are enjoying them at last!


We have been amazed by all the flowers in bloom now. I generally think of flowers as belonging to spring or early summer, but it seems in late summer the colors just explode. We have a variety of sizes and colors, and I love the way they bring their touches of life to the hillside.


When Mick left for Fort Drum last Wednesday, the trees were just starting to turn. Before he came home on Saturday, I told him that I thought we were nearing peak autumn colors -- less than half the trees are still green. I found out later that he didn't believe me when I told him that. But when the sun came up on Sunday, he realized that yes, autumn really was in full swing here! It is hard to believe how quickly everything changed!


We took a short drive on Sunday "around the block" of our future home. (Mick ran this 5-mile loop last week, including running up the hill, which I think is just incredible!) It is a lovely drive.


Then heading up our driveway.


(That "rut in grass" look for our driveway won't last much more than two or three weeks more, it looks like!)


From down the hill looking back up.


The beginning of the woods.


So in between military schools, school and homework, jobs, and preparing to build a house in the next six weeks (!!!!!!!!), we are trying to enjoy as much of autumn as we possibly can. Cheers!

Yellow at Last!

I have been struggling with sunflowers this whole growing season. We planted our annuals later than we otherwise might have because of all the perennials we wanted to put in. The first batch of sunflowers I planted, already with a late start, became a gift to the birds. Once there were no seedlings left, I decided to start over with a second planting. These have managed to defend themselves from the birds and have been growing steadily the last couple of months, although they don't look anything like everybody else's sunflowers! (It is still neat though to see how dramatically they follow the sun.) When I went up this weekend, they were nearly as tall as me, which seemed like a bit of a growth spurt for them. Then when I checked them today, I saw...


YELLOW! There is actually a flower in there after all. I was quite excited. I'm not holding my breath for a great harvest of flowers or seeds, but I'm still excited to see how much growing they can do before the frost comes. (They are predicting a low of 39 for Wednesday night here, hopefully it won't dip too much lower than that, it is only September still!) But regardless of where they go from here, at least I saw some yellow! :)

Great Deliciosity

Mick has been craving fried potatoes since he got back from AT. (Well, technically, his first craving was for fresh vegetables, but one or two freshly picked beans on his first evening home seemed to satisfy that craving, and he moved on to an exclusive craving for fried potatoes.) So anyway, last week he finally decided to tackle his craving once and for all and made restaurant-quality fried potatoes! First he sliced the potatoes...


Then he deep fried them in peanut oil.


Put them in a sieve and refrigerated them before deep-frying them again (this apparently is his secret to making them restaurant-quality).


It even looks like the way they serve them at restaurants!


He wasn't so happy about having to pose for the camera though. (Doesn't he do the best pouty face ever?) :)


Now to the animal segment of this post, Mick took Roscoe up to the hill with him one day last week after we had had a pretty dramatic rainy spell. The grass was still pretty wet, and Roscoe wasn't too happy about hanging out in the wet grass. :)


Gerard likes his little perches throughout the house. We have the shades pulled down in the back room, and the other day I watched him hop on top of the bookshelf, then onto the windowsill. I was thinking that I should open the shade for him so that he could look out the window -- but he took care of that himself, and pushed his way between the shade and the window and curled up to watch the great outdoors. It was very cute. :) He also seems to enjoy boxes.


As far as putting up, just before Mick left for his military school last week, we had a kraut marathon. We listened to Bob (our favorite talk radio show) and chopped 5 huge heads of cabbage (purchased at a very reasonable $2 a pop) and managed to fill a 10-gallon crock with kraut!


We are looking forward to more and more fall (and I am looking forward to Mick coming home again!)


Keeping the home-fires burning...

No Place Like Home

Mick observed this week that we will never technically have a house -- we live in a trailer and are planning to build a cabin.
Speaking of the cabin, here is our most recent floor plan. (Deb, our friendly sales rep at the log home company, told me it was a lovely floor plan -- Mick does a great job!)


Here are some exterior pictures of our cabin kit.



When we're not working on the plans for our cabin, we're generally getting stuff down around the trailer. Mick has done lots of brewing, cider and 3 batches of beer so far, with some more beer on the way!


It is great to have so much stored up, and he is hoping to be able to get supply ahead of demand so there is more time for aging (for the alcohol to age, that is, not the brewer).


We had a cool spell not too long ago. I couldn't believe what Mick was wearing on his feet one morning!


He made a ton of bread, 12 loaves in a day I think.


Boy, is it delicious! How lovely to be able to have such wonderful home-baked bread. I try and do my part to make sure the inventory doesn't go stale.


We have also been harvesting a fair number of vegetables.


Beans have definitely been our most prolific crop. We have frozen and canned many! Actually, Mick figured we have preserved more vegetables already this summer than we ate all last winter. So there are many more vitamins in our future, huzzah! This picture shows canned beans waiting to be transported to the pantry, freshly picked cucumbers (still in their picking basket) waiting to become pickles or relish, and one of our freshly purchased oversized heads of cabbage waiting to become sauerkraut.



My success story of the day was finally winning my long struggle with the sewing machine! I have been trying to patch Mick's jeans since last summer I think, and I finally was able to finish the patches for this particular pair of jeans (the large patch at the bottom left of the picture was the last patch -- you may notice less masses of thread and general disaster areas on this patch than on the other ones). Definitely not a pretty job! but a huge success for me to get through the whole patch without breaking a needle, jamming the machine in some other inexplicable fashion, etc. Don't place your orders yet for homemade clothing (my poor gracious husband has turned out to be my sewing guinea pig), but we are moving in a good direction at last, HUZZAH!!


Autumn is beginning here, which is absolutely incredible. Many trees (at least many compared to what I would expect in the first week of September) are already changing color and dropping their leaves. I came home from work yesterday and Mick had picked up a little bit of fall for us.


And in the meantime, we rest easy knowing that someone is watching over us.