It's the Holiday Season, Merry Christmas!

One week til Christmas. I do have some Christmas presents to purchase, yet. But, I do want to talk about events over the last few weeks. I see that it has been several weeks since my last post, as usual, that is because I have to remember to download photos off of my camera so that I can include them in my posts. Without pictures, the posts can be pretty hard to swallow.


1969 Jaguar XKE, 2+2 with factory air and manual 4 speed transmission.

 Yes, it is mine. Sort of. Actually, the bank owns it for right now. I bought it last week. It has 19,000 miles on the odometer. Everything works. It's kind of like sitting in a fighter jet plane. Very comfortable. I plan to drive it on a regular basis. You can actually get two child car seats in the back seat (proved it last Sunday). They say it will get up to 25 miles per gallon on the highway.

A really cool fall morning on the Pearson farm.  This is one of the many pleasures we enjoy from being out here in the country.

Now that the weather is cooling off, it is time to get the old wood cookstove fired up again.

Starts off with a Wal-Mart bag of apples from a friend at church, Beth Williamson.  The evaporated milk was for the pumpkin pies. The bowl on the floor is to catch the peels as they come off of the apple peeler.

Thank the Lord, my old loose-leaf Betty Crocker cookbook has a recipe for deep-dish apple pie.

Next, comes in an antique apple peeler.  It took me a couple of apples to get the hang of it, but actually works great.  It has one knife that pushes the peel off as you crank, another one that takes the peel off from around the stem end, and then when it finishes, it has a "pusher" that pushes the peeled apple off of the holder.  Pretty cool, huh?

15 tart apples and a couple hours of peeling, cutting, trimming and you have the apples for a deep dish apple pie.



Once the apples are peeled, I cut them and core them with a (modern) apple corer and then trim off the brown spots and cut them up into small bits.  Now, I have apples for pie and a bowl full of peels, cores, stems and trimmings.  Wait a minute!  Can't I make apple jelly from that?!

 Yes, I can! Of course, now I have to go way back to my old Searchlight cookbook from the 1800s for a recipe for apple jelly. It did jell, but a bit too soft. More like apple syrup, actually. But, still quite good. Better than just throwing it all out. After I got done with making the jelly the pigs got it, anyway. So, both of



It actually started out on the electric stove (old habits die hard) and then it occurred to me that I have the wood stove going for the pies, why not cook the apples there?  Duh!

 us got to benefit from it. Nothing wasted.



One tasty deep-dish apple pie.

 Once I had the apple pie in the cookstove oven I turned my attention to the pumpkin pies. I have enough pumpkin from our Jack-o-lanterns to do several pies, but I limited myself to just 3. Be reasonable!



One apple pie and 3 pumpkin pies. Again, the electric stove comes in handy when you need a heat-proof spot to cool pies.

 Again, as I have posted in the past, I got a great tip from my fellow wood cookstove buff, Jim, at http://woodcookstovecooking.blogspot.com/. He gave me the idea when he was trying to get the excess water out of tomatoes, trying to make homemade ketchup. After the pumpkin is cooked and scraped off of the skin I put it into a jelly bag (old T-shirt) and let it drain overnight. Then I squeeze as much water out of the jelly bag as I can with my hands. The result is much drier and makes for a much better pie (more stuff, less water). I like it and the pies taste much better, too. I just mush it up with my hands rather than running it through the food processor. Too much work. Hands are cheap and easy, and it gives the pie better texture (more tooth).



Thanksgiving dinner at grandma and grandpa's house.  From right to left, my wife, Brenda, on the far right, then Maddie (foster child), then sons Adam and Andrew.



Fall is in the air.

Now that fall is in the air, we have a lot of projects that need to get done before winter. First, the 20 or so roosters that we still have around will need to be dressed (or un-dressed, so to speak) and put in the freezer. I did 3 of them 10 days ago, plucked, gutted and put away. I did 3 more last Saturday, this time I skinned them instead of plucking, as I have heard that skinning is so much faster. Not! It ended up taking exactly the same amount of time as plucking, and it was much more physical hard work. So, back to plucking.



A nice young man from church comes over sometimes to mow.  He was here, so he got the opportunity to help pluck chickens.  He will never look at a chicken dinner the same after this.  I am dipping the next "victim" in scalding water in preparation for the plucking.


Next, the pigs are out. Not out of our property, but out of the electric fenced area, about one acre. Over the summer the grass grew so thick around the electric wires that it weighed the wires down to the ground. So the pigs eventually figured out that it wasn't working any more, so they went exploring. So, right now, we keep the front gate closed all the time, even when we are home, so the pigs won't escape. For the time being, they have not tried to go through the barbed wire, although it wouldn't take much for them to do that. It's not too bad right now, but I can see that this is not a long-term solution, so I will have to mow down the grass that has grown over the electric fence so that it will be working again. I did spray the grass along the fence with Rounduup, which actually worked very well to kill the grass, but it didn't magically disappear like I was hoping for, so I still have to mow it down. Hopefully, next spring it won't grow back in the same spot. The pigs don't really cause any havoc, but it is a bit unnerving to walk out the front door and have two 500 pound pigs standing there on the front walk, staring you in the eye. The upside is that they are finding lots of good things to eat, so we haven't had to feed them nearly as much over the last 2-3 weeks. The other downside is, that they don't always hold it until they get back to their area, so we have to watch where we step. It's not quite the same as a dog.



It's bad enough having chickens in the front yard.  Pigs is, well, it's just too much.


Next, the hay needs to be stacked. I mowed the upper half of the property about a week ago, and it is dry enough now to stack on the haystack I made some weeks ago. Since I made it, rain and time have gradually worked on it, so that a 10 foot high stack is now about 5 feet high. I will also need to mow the lower 5 acres, as it did not get mowed and baled this year. The elderly fellow that used to do it with his grandson died this summer and apparently the grandson isn't interested. Which is okay, as I plan to start using the hay myself.

Next, the bees have worked their magic again this year, and I need to get the honey super off of the hive and extract the golden sweetness and get it put up in jars.

Next, the new hens are starting to lay. So, once the new roosters are in the freezer, I will need to move the hens to the lower chicken house for the winter, as it is insulated. The summer house is uninsulated and I don't want them to freeze. They don't have a nesting box, so they have been laying in the bed of the pickup truck and on the shelf in the tractor shed. We have been getting from 5 to 8 eggs a day for the last week, so we have given away a bunch of eggs. They build up fast!

Next, every time I go out to where the walnut trees are I nearly break my ankles on all the walnuts. This is walnut buying week, which we missed last year. So, I need to get out there and get them picked up and take them to the walnut buyers and see if I can get some cash for them, rather that just using them to fill pot holes in the driveway, which is what happened to them last year.

Next, the swimming pool is pretty much ready for winter, but I would like to put a leaf net over it to try to keep the leaves from accumulating on the bottom of the pool, which is what happened last year. We closed up the pool a few weeks ago when it got cold and took out the pump and drained the water out of the filter. Then the weather turned warm again and the water all turned green. So we added a bunch of chlorine powder a few days ago to try to keep it from getting too green until the weather gets cold again.

Next, since the weather is starting to get cool, I am going to start using the woodfired cookstove again, which is really nice on a cold Saturday morning. So that means I need to start cutting firewood. The huge dead walnut tree about halfway down the driveway still has several more branches that can be cut and split into firewood. Last winter I went the whole winter burning wood in the cookstove and the fireplace all on just one branch from that tree. The trunk at the bottom is about 4 feet across, and each one of the branches is about 2 feet across.

Next, the pond is nowhere near as full as it should be. I have finally concluded that it will have to be drained and re-built. It fills when it rains, but then the water leaks out again until it gets to where it is now, which is about 5 feet of water. It should have about 10-12 feet of water. I don't know for sure where the leak is, but I am pretty sure it is in the area of the big bedrock rise in the middle of the pond. The fellow who built it the first time told me that that could be a problem. What he should have done is to dig out all the bedrock that sticks up in the middle of the pond and then seal it at the bottom, but I assumed he knew what he was doing. So it goes. It's really too late to do that this year, as it has to be done when it is dry, so that will have to wait until next summer.

Next, it will be deer season soon, and there are lots of delicious looking deer around the property, so I am hoping to convert a few hours of hunting into about 100 pounds of venison.

As you can see, there is about two weeks' worth of work that needs to be done this Saturday. I am planning to retire in about 3 years, and I am accumulating things to be done after I retire. The way things are going, I will have to live to 100 just to get caught up on projects that should have been done BEFORE I retired.

Summer is about gone. (8-7-14)

(August 7, 2014) I have not been doing much of anything with the farm this summer. I have a pretty good excuse, as I crashed my bicycle July 13th, got a severe head injury and a broken right collarbone, spent 3 days in the hospital and had to be off work for 3 weeks to recover. As I am right handed the broken bone prevented me from doing much of anything on the farm. Brenda has been helping with feeding the livestock, but there is a very long list of work projects that haven't been done as a result of my disability. Right before the crash the foster kids got adopted out, so we don't have any foster kids right now. We plan to get more in a few weeks, after we get back from a planned vacation.

I got my younger son, Adam, to help butcher one pig before the bike crash, so the meat is in the freezer. Unfortunately, as this is the first time for this, I did not think to pack the meat in ice like I should have. So, the meat was way too warm for way too long in the freezer and now it smells bad. I don't know how much of it is still safe to eat. There is about 300 lb. of meat altogether. Since my injury prevents me from doing any heavy lifting I have not been able to pull it out of the freezer to check on it to see if some of it is going to be edible. Live and learn. The remaining pigs are the Large Black sow and the Hampshire cross boar.

The sow gave birth to seven baby pigs a few weeks ago, but they didn't make it. I think that she just wasn't giving them enough milk to survive. So, hopefully she will have another litter in a few months and she will do better this time.


One pig was white with black spots almost like a Gloucestershire Old Spot.  One was black and white like a Hampshire, and the other two were brown and white.  As mom is a Large Black and dad is Hampshire/Yorkshire half and half, there must be other genes floating around in there somewhere.


The 25 chickens are doing great. About 6 of them are hens and the rest are roosters. They are now big enough to butcher, so as soon as I am cleared by the doctor to start using my right arm again, we will start butchering the roosters. I plan to keep the hens, to replace the ones I have right now. They will be old enough to molt in a few months, so when they stop laying they will be next in line to butcher. We actually started out with 60 chickens but for some reason a bunch of them decided that they didn't need to go inside the hen house at night. Well, it didn't take long for the raccoons and possums and foxes to find out that we had a free buffet line, and they went away. So, the ones we have now are the ones who stayed inside the hen house every night. I guess that even though there is plenty of space for 60 chickens to roost in the hen house, they felt crowded.




This is Brenda's new solar powered clothes dryer.

  So, you ask, how is it going with the solar panels? Well, it is working well, but not perfect. That is, our electric bill last month was $95. On the one hand, it is a very small electric bill considering that the whole house and all the appliances, air conditioning, water heaters, everything is electric. Sure, it would be nice to have an electric bill that was $0, but on the other hand, there was no practical way for me to know how much electricity the house was going to use under normal conditions before it was built. So, the best I could do was to use our electric usage from the previous house as a guesstimate. I could have made the solar panels larger, as there is room for 6 more panels on the roof of the workshop, but that would have been expensive, as the current (no pun intended) setup uses the maximum number of panels for that system. Adding more panels would have required a whole new hookup system, electric meter, monitoring system, and so on. Generally speaking, you want to produce less electricity that you use. The reason is, that the electric company can produce electricity a whole lot cheaper than I can. My electricity is expensive, theirs is cheap. So to produce extra electricity would be a waste of money. The object is to produce just a little bit less than I use, but it is very hard to know exactly how much we use until we have lived in the house for a few years, and we wanted all the contruction done at one time.

No apologies, just more fun

I thought about apologizing for the long wait for the next post, but we will skip that and move on to the good stuff. We are well into early summer now here in Springfield, Missouri. We had some cold weather last week when it got down into the 30s at night and we had some frost on the grass in the morning. Now it is in the 60s at night and well into the 80s during the day. We got the swimming pool up and running a few weeks ago and with the warm weather this week the kids are swimming nearly every evening, which is great. The best thing for a pool is for it to be used nearly every day.

I have it in mind to cut my own hay and put it up in haystacks. Now I don't know anything about haystacks and haying, so this is all a learning experience. I used to have a hay baler but I sold all my haying equipment some years ago thinking I was just going to raise cattle on our land and didn't have enough land for that and for hay, too. But now that we are doing pigs and other small animals I am going back toward haying. So, the plan is to see if I can buy a hay mower and hay rake and then make haystacks instead of bales. That way, they don't have to be stored in a barn and I don't have to have a baler. I am always coming up with ways to spend money on farm equipment. Actually, with the last hay equipment I had, I bought it for about $1,000 and sold it for $2,500, so it turned out okay. (that's probably the last time I will ever make any profit on this farm)

We had some real excitement a few weeks ago when I decided to burn the grass out of the fence line and the fire took off into the field next door. We had to call the fire department and it took them about 3 hours to control it. Actually all they did was to keep it from getting into the yard of the house and keep it from jumping the road. It ended up burning 30 acres. The property owner came over and thanked me for burning off his hay field, as he said it really is good for the grass to be burned off every year. It scared me to death.



Brenda and the kids are watching the fire department trying to control the grass fire.  The neighbors are watching from their pickup truck.  They asked me if I wouldn't mind burning the rest of the field, but I didn't think the firemen would appreciate that.

  I was just thankful the neighbors weren't upset with me for burning their field for them. I made the last meal for the summer on the wood cookstove. The weather was cool, and I had just enough firewood cut for one more meal. I cooked the meal on the stove and baked bread in the oven. The meal was great, but the bread was a bit too wet in the center, probably because I let it get too hot, so the outside was getting too dark before the inside had a chance to cook completely. I will practice some more come cool fall weather.




Two pots on the stove and the bread is rising on top of the warming oven.

 Well, we have another newest member of the family, his name is King but we call him Matthew, as it sounds better.



Matthew enjoying his dinner.

 Matthew is a meth baby, his mother and father are in and out of jail for drugs and other assorted offenses. He is about 6 weeks old now, and is doing very well. As far as we can tell he doesn't have any long term problems from the meth. He will probably be with us for a while, as it normally takes a year or more for legal stuff to be done so that he can be available for adoption. Easter has come and gone, it was nice to have our friends' kids the Zachary family come over and help the little kids coloring Easter eggs on Saturday before Easter.






Most of the color ended up on the eggs.  We did have one spill, but that's not too bad, considering.

 Brenda made lots of devilled eggs for the Easter breakfast at church and lots more over the next few weeks.



It's interesting what a little bit of food coloring and some ordinary vinegar can do.

 My next brainstorm was to buy some baby chicks. Lots of baby chicks. Lots and lots and lots. Like 60 of them. The idea is that we buy chicken at the store almost every week. So, why not just raise them myself? Originally, I thought that the hens would lay eggs, and sit on them, and raise the chicks, and then we would eat them. But I think the hens got wind of this and so they have refused to sit on the eggs. So, we get eggs (we have eggs coming out of our ears) but no chicks. So, I bought 60 chicks from the Cackle Hatchery in Lebanon, which is not too far from here. It really was a good deal, I got 50 rooster chicks for about 50 cents apiece, which was really good, and then I got 10 pullet chicks to replace the hens I have now when they stop laying. The rooster chicks are cheap because most people don't want a bunch of roosters running around, but I plan to kill them all before they start crowing.



This is what 60 baby (one day old) chicks look like.  It was kind of a shock to see how much 60 baby chicks will eat.

My buddy Tyler Zachary came over and helped me build a new chicken house for these chickens, as the old one is full with the 4 hens and a rooster, there would be room for that many chicken in there, anyway. Since these will all be in the freezer long before winter, it didn't need to be weatherproof, nor did it need any insulation. In fact, if anything, it needed lots of good ventilation. So, I got some used barn roofing tin sheets and used that for the sides and roof. I built it on 4x4 skids to make it easier to move around, as I plan to move them down with the pigs when they are big enough.




Lots of "helpers."

  Actually, considering my complete lack of construction skills it turned out very nice. We were able to complete the whole thing with just a little bit left over.






All I can say is, praise to the Lord God for helping me get this all figured out.  Usually with these things I end up having to run to the store for more of one thing or another, sometimes more than one trip.

 We needed to do something with the rest of the venison that we still had in the deep freeze and we were buying a lot of pork sausage, as Brenda is allergic to beef. So, I decided to grind the rest of the venison and use that instead of ground beef or pork sausage. I boned out the rest of the venison we had and ran it through the electric grinder (the new meat saw has a grinder attached to one side). It worked great! I ended up with about 17 lb. of ground venison. We have been using it for meals since then (tacos, lasagna, spaghetti) and it tastes great! I really can't tell the difference from ground beef, but maybe my taste buds are just not very refined.

Packed in one pound portions in zip lock bags and then into the deep freeze.

I let the chicks out into their little pen during the day and then lock them up at night to keep them from being eaten by the wild animals around here. The pen is small enough to protect them from hawks.


It was interesting how big this area was when they first started to go out, and how small it is getting now that the grass is getting beaten down.  I will move them to a new patch of grass soon.

 I built the chicken house with space for the water and feed containers, but I found after a while that it worked much better for the feed and water to be outside, unless it is raining. They don't mess it up as much, and they don't dump it over so much when it is outside.




They have 3 tiers of perches, I don't want to put one perch above another, as they would poop on each other.  I think there's enough room for all 55 of them to roost at night when they get big.  There's 55 because 5 of them didn't survive the first week.

  The plan is to butcher the white female hog this weekend. I haven't weighed them so I really don't know how much she weighs, but I figure probably between 250 and 300 lb., which would yield about 175-200 lb. of pork altogether, including the little bits that make sausage, and the lard for making soap. Even the little bits like ears, tail, pig's feet, everything can be used for something. I have saved some wood ashes from the stove and fireplace to make lye for making soap.




My boar pig.  He has Hampshire markings, but he is half Hampshire and half Yorkshire.  The plan is to breed him with the Large Black sow.

 It's hard to believe that last September they were so small you could hold one in your two hands.

Bottle babies, one week old, last September.




Automatic garbage disposals.  Last November. about 60 lb.

 

Feed, lots and lots of feed. I can tell you, it doesn't save us any money, but I do enjoy taking care of them.





Pork. Pork chops, pork tenderloin, pork shoulder, pork sausage, ham, bacon, ribs, yum!



Winter hangs on

For just one week there, we had a breath, just a breath of coming spring, and then, BANG right back to winter. Ouch! It almost hurt more to have a tease of warm days and then back to very cold again.  But, at least the warm weather thawed out the ground enough so I could get some dirt moved into what will some day be my vegetable garden.



This is Brenda with little Deja

  Well, this is a bit of fresh air! This is little Deja, she is a foster child we had for one weekend. She came to us from the hospital, she was 3 days old, and she stayed with us until they were able to arrange for another foster family to care for her and her big brother.



Eggs!  It's fascinating to see all the different colors.

 We have started getting four eggs a day. It's amazing that we have been getting only one or two eggs a day for several months, even when we had 8 hens. Now, in the middle of winter, they have decided to start laying. Who knows the mind of a chicken? Maybe this is a sign of coming spring. I am hoping that at least one of the hens will decide that it is time for her to raise a family. I have four different breeds of hens, Rhode Island Red, Barred Plymouth Rock, Buff Orpington, and an Americauna. The rooster is a black sex linked breed (whatever that is).




Oatmeal pancakes.  If you have never eaten oatmeal pancakes, then you will just have to give it a try.  It's a bit of work to put together, but it's definitely worth the effort.

 Here's the recipe for oatmeal pancakes:
1 cup oat flour (I grind my own, but you can get it at the store)
4 cups milk (divided)
1 cup of one minute oatmeal
2 eggs
2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
Here's how I do it. First, I heat the milk in the microwave until it's almost boiling, then I put it in a pan on the stove, add the one minute oats and stir constantly with a wire whisk, because that keeps the milk from burning on the bottom of the pan. Then, when it starts to boil, I turn the heat off but leave it on the stove to keep cooking while I mix the other ingredients. Next put the oat flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl and mix, then add eggs and oil and mix. Then, add the cooked oatmeal and then add about another 2-3 cups of milk and mix thoroughly until it is the desired consistency. I like it a little bit runny so that it cooks quickly all the way through, othewise it can be a bit wet in the center when the outside is cooked.

My mother taught me to test the griddle with a drop of cold water. When it is hot enough so the water drop dances around the griddle in little tiny balls, it is hot enough for pancakes.




The three not-so-little pigs.  In my opinion they  aren't pigs any more, they are hogs.





The time is drawing nigh for the next pig to make its way to the deep freezer. They are eating me out of house and home. It's time to cut my expenses. I had a friend's 14 year old son over a couple weeks ago who likes to work with me with the farm work and I was joking with him about the pigs. You know, they eat like pigs, they are making pigs of themselves, the big one is hogging the feeder, their pasture is like a pig sty, things like that. One advantage of the cold weather, their pasture doesn't smell bad when it's below freezing.

Mixed berry pie.  Long story.

Sunday we had a sort of ice and snow storm so church was cancelled.  So, I was stuck at home with a wood burning cookstove, a pile of firewood and a burning desire to cook something.  So, as I had one frozen pie crust and a bag of frozen mixed berries (straw, rasp, blue) I saw a mixed berry pie coming.  One problem, though.  Only one crust for a two-crust pie.  That meant (NOOOOO) I would have to make the other crust from scratch.  Well, long story short, I did actually get a pie crust on the pie (as you can see) on the third try.  I rolled it out as thin as I could, as I knew it was going to tough.  But, at least it tastes good, and that is half the battle.

Bean soup.

Wood cookstove project #2, bean soup.  I had cooked some ribs last week and saved the broth, and I wanted to make soup, so, one pound of dry beans (mixed beans) a bay leaf, one can of diced tomatoes, some dried minced onions, a dash of garlic powder, and about 4 cups of pork ribs broth.  Heat to boiling, then simmer on a wood stove all day, and even the little kids ate the whole thing!  I did have to add hot water to it from time to time when it got boiled down too much, but, wow! Yes!  I have hot water right there on the stove top!

Leftovers.  Oatmeal raisin cookies and Denver omelet scramble (from Taste of Home).

Wood stove project #3, oatmeal cookies, from my Betty Crocker looseleaf cookbook.  Even a bit too brown on the edges, they went fast!
Wood stove project #4, Denver Omelet Scramble.  I used my 12 inch cast iron frying pan, fried the potatoes, onions and green bell pepper first, then, when the potatoes were starting to brown I added the ham and eggs and baked it in the oven for about 20 minutes.  I know this isn't a surprise to those of you who use cast iron fry pans regularly but it still amazes me when something like this comes right out of the pan, just like Teflon!

The overflow.  I couldn't get all the berry mix in the pie, so I just cooked the rest in the oven and we had it with ice cream.  Yum!  The cookie sheet has the edges off of the pie crust, like my mother used to make, with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on it.

Breakfast was oatmeal pancakes.  For lunch, Denver Omelet Scramble with oatmeal cookies for dessert.  Supper was bean soup and berry pie and ice cream for dessert.  Plus, it kept the whole house nice and toasty warm all day!  Who wouldn't want a wood cookstove in their house?

After a long, hard day of cooking for me I gave the Glenwood a good scrubbing all over with some steel wool and got most of the grease spots off.

Christmas and New Years Holidays

Christmas was a great time, lots of family here, lots of driving.


Santa's little elves getting ready on Christmas Eve.  Brenda on the left wrapping presents, Lydia on the right, resting up for the big day.

 We enjoyed having the foster kids for Christmas, it's fun to watch little kids opening presents, but it's also wonderful to have our own kids around.



The little ones putting their Christmas bean bag chairs to use on Christmas morning.

 Lydia was home from college, so we were able to spend some time together. Abby and her husband were able to come home for a few days from New Hampshire, which was really nice. We were able to drive to Kansas City for a day to spend with Grandma and Grandpa Barclift, along with the Kansas City crew, Joseph and Miranda, and Andrew and Renae. New Year's was a nice relaxing day at home, and then time at the pastor's house with church family for the evening. We butchered one of the pigs for Christmas eats. A friend of Brenda's from work has a boyfriend who has done this before, so he was gracious enough to agree to walk me through the process, and he brought a pig of his own so we kind of did this together, him on his pig and me on mine. He shot his the day before, so it was already kind of halfway done. I picked the littlest one, as I figured since he was the runt of the litter he would never grow much, anyway.



I know it doesn't look like much, but this is going to be what is known in old-time cookery as "head cheese."

 After cooking it on the wood stove all day, I picked off all the meat, mixed it with spices and chopped it up very small, then packed it tight in a Tupperware bowl and put it in the fridge to cool. The next day I popped it out of the bowl, and there you are! Head cheese. I guess it's kind of like balogna, only that would be processed very fine, more like paste.

Getting ready to have a yummy head cheese sandwich.

We had a "ham" for Christmas dinner, only instead of it being cured and smoked like real ham, it was more like ordinary pork roast, cooked in the wood stove.

I found the recipe for "fresh ham" online.  It was really good!

Well, I have experienced a shift in my hobby interests. For some years I have had an old car, actually two old cars. I had in mind to get them all fixed up, but time and money were not in my favor, so they just sat for years. Well, Brenda and I were on a wedding anniversary trip for a weekend and I saw a sailboat for sale. I have always wanted a "real" sailboat. You know, with a jib and a spinnaker, and a cabin down below so that you can sleep down there and all that, and the price was very attractive, so I made a deal. I am getting rid of the old cars and I bought a boat. Now, I must admit that I have never been on a big sailboat before, even though I have sailed for many years, it was always in very small boats with a lateen sail. The one I have been using is big enough for one person only, and you have to duck when you tack or the boom will knock you over the side.



Santana 21, made by W.D. Schock sailboat company.  They are still in business, still make sailboats of this size.

 This boat is a 21 foot Santana. It was made in 1976, which goes along with all the other old clunky stuff we have around the farm. The great part about it is that it is all there, ready to sail. All the ropes, sails, mast, everything. The wood in the cabin is old and rotting but still serviceable. I have been buying and reading about every book on old sailboats and sailing that I can find, trying to figure out how the thing works. It is fiberglass, so I don't have to worry about the hull rotting. One of the previous owners apparently saw that there was a lot of rainwater accumulating in the bilge, so they thoughtfully drilled a hole in the bottom to let the water out! Wow! What a great idea! Now when I go sailing I don't have to worry about getting water in the boat! Well, anyway, there is that one thing that will have to be done before I go sailing for the first time. The nice thing is that it is small enough to pull behind the car, but large enough to actually spend the night if I want to. There's no kitchen or bathroom, but it's okay for picnics close to shore. Brenda has a friend at work that has a sailboat and she and her husband sail to the Bahamas every year, so they are going to come over and show me how the thing works. It was apparently used a lot for racing in the past, as it has a lot of very expensive hardware on the deck that was used for handling the sails.

I figured out a couple things with the wood stove. One, it really does help to get something hot quick, like the pancake griddle, or even just the big frying pan, to remove the lid and set the pan directly over the fire. I know this sounds obvious now, but I always thought the lids were there for a reason. I guess really it's the holes that are there for a reason. The other thing is, I always have had trouble finding sticks of the right size for the fire. I have to dig way down in the wood box to find the one I want. I finally realized that if I just stand them on end, it is immediately apparent how big they are, which makes it much easier to pick the one I want.



You can't get as many sticks in there going up and down, but at least you can see what's there.