Yes, it’s true, we had an Oregon blizzard last night (half an inch of snow that melts by noon.) This was the scene around 8:30am today: The daffodills sagged, but I’ve seen them do that before; they’ll pop right back up tomorrow: This apple is probably getting a bit overripe now: …but the fir trees don’t mind the weather, they just keep on photosynthesizing all year long -

Not that Oregon has much to complain about in the way of winter anyway =) View from the goat house, past a bird house (and pieces of goathouse that haven’t found their places yet), to our house:

First, I notice that there’s a big pretty bird in our yard, that I’ve never seen before. He’s so distinctive that I have to try to identify him. Thanks to my handy-dandy Audubon Society Field Guide to the Pacific Northwest, I can pretty confidently say that he (along with his partner, who showed up later), is a Northern Flicker, part of the Woodpecker family. Since I’m still avoiding studying, I decide that I would be remiss if were to miss this opportunity to get some photos of the pair of them. (Notice that the male has the red spots on his cheeks – the female’s coloring is similar to the male’s, but she lacks those red spots.) Next, I remember that Peter had separated the cream from our latest jar of fresh raw cow’s milk (if you missed it, he posted about our first raw milk tasting and the local family farm that’s supplying us here), setting it aside to try our hands at butter-making. Suddenly it becomes quite urgent to get the butter made today – so I pull the mason jar from the fridge and start shaking. And shaking. And shaking. When my arms start feeling like they’re going to fall off, I take a break. By this point, what I have in the jar is whipped cream. So I shake some more. And some more. And some more. And then, whadda ya know! The curds (the chunky bits that will become the butter) begin to separate from the whey (the liquid). This is what it looks like: This inspires me, so I keep on shakin’. Pretty soon, I’ve got a pretty good chunk of butter in the middle of the whey (the jar is tipped on its side in this photo, to better see the almost-butter): I drain off the liquid into another jar, and keep shaking for a few more minutes – the shaking is what’s separating the liquids from the solids, and I want to make sure I’ve got all the liquids out. Next, I put the hunk of butter into a bowl, and rinse it with cold water, “massaging” the butter with a spoon to squeeze out the last of the milky liquids. I keep rinsing with fresh water until the water remains clear. Here’s what we’ve got: And here’s the finished product put away in a jar, along with our approximately 1/2 cup of buttermilk! (I think I may see buttermilk pancakes in our future…) Of course, I now realize that in order to fully appreciate our first-ever batch of homemade butter, we’ll need some fresh hot homemade cinnamon raisin bread, so I move on to bread-making. And since I’m still avoiding studying for finals, I decide that now would be a good time to tell ya’all about our first-ever batch of homemade ginger ale. I’d found the recipe a few weeks ago, but we hadn’t gotten around to trying it – until Peter got inspired and I came home the other day to a freshly-bottled batch (ignore the labels – we washed, sterilized, and re-used old soda bottles we had saved for this purpose). It’s actually pretty easy to make: simmer chopped-up ginger root and sugar in a pot of water for about 30-60 minutes (the longer the simmer, the stronger the flavor), then remove it from the heat and strain out the remaining ginger pulp, add more water and let it cool. After about 15 minutes, add brewer’s yeast and let it sit for a few more minutes, then bottle it up! You just need to keep an eye on it – once it’s carbonated, put it in the fridge to stop the process. **Peter added a bit of cayenne to this batch as well, to give it an extra kick. One of the best things about the homemade brew? We control the amount of sugar we use – and much of it is eaten up by the yeast. And the waste products of the yeast? B vitamins! With less sugar and actual nutrients, it’s not only tastier – it’s way healthier than the store-bought stuff. And, now that I’ve enjoyed a bowl of Peter’s homemade stew (made with locally raised goat meat), a slice of homemade raisin bread with homemade butter and a glass of homemade ginger ale, stacked a large pile of wood as Peter did the splittin’, and written up my quiet country day, I think it really is time to turn my mind to studying.

I’ve been meaning to post some of these for awhile, but I’ve had some sort of strange Macintosh/Wordpress/satellite mis-connection which wouldn’t allow me to load our own blog page. It happened suddenly sometime in late December/early January, persisted no matter what remedies we tried (though Peter could load our site just fine on his computer, and I could load it when I was in town with a wifi connection – go figure), and then spontaneously righted itself just a few weeks ago. So yay! I can once again view and post to my own site – and here come a slew of pics that I’ve been saving up. First off, our bathroom. Those who are regular readers (or have visited and seen for yourselves) may remember me mentioning that the interior walls of our cottage are painted in multiple colors – and not in an intentional design-y sort of way. Each room has spots where it looks like someone started painting over an old color, and then promptly got bored with it and walked away, without even finishing the wall they were working on. So, high up on our long list of projects is to paint each room. We finally got around to starting with the bathroom one weekend in early December (it was the smallest room, and therefore the easiest to complete in a weekend). The bathroom has some pretty tile work, installed by one of the former tenants – I really wanted the walls to be some sort of warm orange-ish color, to bring out the warm orange tones in the tile. On the other hand, we both really like purple, and we already had purple bath towels. So here’s what we came up with: It’s now my favorite room in the house! The bedroom is next on our list… Next up, our brief winter. I posted awhile back that it mostly rains rather than snows here in the winter (which is true), and that the best I could do to fulfill a request for some winter scenes was some photos taken after a rather paltry snowfall. I should’ve waited just a little bit longer. In January and February, we finally got dumped on – ‘course, it only happened about 2 or 3 times, and then it all went away and became rain again. It seems a little silly to be posting winter photos now, since spring has sprung out here with such abundance, but here they are: And last but not least, one of our resident spiders, wrapping a trapped and buzzing fly in its web. I think Peter may have posted a similar photo not too long ago, but this was just too cool not to use.

Daisies, Daffodills, Dandelions (not shown), and another unknown yellow flower…spring is tickling and teasing us It’s so nice out that I even spotted a rural farmwife hanging her sheets on the line:

This evening I stopped in at a nearby farm to pick up an order of drug-free, hormone-free, etc. goat meat. Deck Family Farm is a beautiful place about ten minutes* from us, with lots of happy looking cows, chickens, sheep, ducks…I’m pretty sure I saw a bison there too, though it may have been a big muddy brown cow from a distance. I didn’t see the goats…I was tempted to ask, but didn’t want to impose and delay what must be a zillion chores on such a large (for one family) farm. I ended up leaving with a half-gallon of fresh, raw cow milk, a dozen eggs, a pound of stew goat, a pound of goatburger, and a 3-pound goat roast. This is the kind of thing that excites me these days. Yes, I am almost 40. If we ever buy “supermarket” eggs again, I will have to do side-by-side photos; pastured, free-range eggs from our neighbors have bright orangy-yellow yolks and make the store-bought kind look and taste pretty much like cardboard. The goats we’re preparing to get will be a dairy breed, but I’m an inveterate carnivore and would like to eventually produce my own meat, so buying the goat meat is sort of an experiment to see how I like having goat as a primary meat source (though we’re planning on keeping chickens, too). If it works out, we may at some point consider getting some meat goats (different breeds from dairy goats). [edit] The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that we will want meat goats, for practical and sentimental (ie, they’re too darn smart and cute) reasons. Looks like we’re gonna be eating a lot of chicken! Rabbits are another very good smallholder meat animal, but suffer from the same “how do you eat a pet” problem as goats. I don’t think I’d have any problem eating chickens, though they do have a lot more charm and personality than I knew before [/edit] I feel that if I can’t bear to put the bullet into the back of its head and cut up the carcass, I really don’t deserve to eat meat. We’ll see. But for now, we have a local source for clean, humanely raised meats =) Of course, the moment I got home I had to try the milk side-by-side with some “whole” milk from the supermarket. A sip of one. A sip of the other. Remaining supermarket milk goes back into the bottle for emergencies, and I pour another glass of the rich, delicious raw milk. It’s on the left in the photo below * Ten minutes on normal roads. On the way back, I decided to try a “shortcut” involving steep, twisty logging roads. It was a nice 45 minute drive; fortunately the van has a refrigerator to keep our food from spoiling.

The goat house now has a floor, all its walls, and half a roof! It has also been jacked up and set back down on (scavenged, naturally) concrete blocks to prevent the wood beams from rotting in the Oregon moisture. The top 1/2 of 3 walls will be left open for ventilation and light, and shuttered during any cold winter storms. Investment so far: about $50 for roof beams, screws, tar paper (partial rolls from a local construction materials reclamation facility called Bring Recycling.), and a roof vent (also from Bring).

There’s a patch of old growth forest about 4 miles down the road from us, and though most land is green out here, the farms and tree plantations that predominate are nothing like this. It’s a cathedral with a babbling stream as the center aisle and fir trees standing nearly 300 feet tall down either side. It’s pointless to even think of capturing the sheer amazingosity of this place with a camera, but here are a couple of photos: …and here’s one Teri took, apparently of a sasquatch: