kmkat and her kneedles

Saturday: frolicking and fitting, tra la.

ETA: There is a non-workplace-suitable photo at the end of this post. Be warned!

One of my duties as a county supervisor is to be the county representative on the two lake associations located in my district. One is my own lake association. Today was the annual meeting and picnic of the other, above. This lake is quite a bit larger than ours, and the crowd visibly wealthier. That woman in the center front in the denim cutoffs and dark gray shirt is a former Twin City anchorwoman who went on to CNN. Elsewhere in the crowd is a well-known Twin City radio announcer, now retired, who was one-half of a popular morning drive-time show for many years. There were well-to-do businessmen and attorneys, trophy wives and doctors (probably; I did not meet any personally). All nice enough people, but definitely a different crowd than that on my own little lake.

Speaking of my lake, let me show you our Fourth of July boat parade. It is a casual affair.

There were a couple other pontoons, but it is always a small parade. Small lake, small parade.

The last photo made me chuckle in a wicked manner. The guy in the canoe is a freshman at Purdue; the pontoon belongs to his lake-dwelling grandparents and is full of his friends. Unfortunately for them, the DNR had a warden on our little lake that day and every one of those kids got a $200 ticket for not having a flotation device. Oops.

* * * * *

One the knitting front, I bought myself a new toy: an adjustable dress form. I have wanted one for a number of years, and the sweater I am making was the trigger that sent me to eBay last week to buy one.

Here it is, hard at work modeling the Summer Raglan (notice how cleverly I matched the stitch markers to the yarn):

You might wonder why it is wearing a bra. Good question; let me explain the ways of adjustable dress forms.

An adjustable dress form is adjustable in length and girth, but only in an overall way. My own particular body bits are distributed rather differently than is represented by the dummy. (No remarks, please.) For example, when I expanded the bust line to be the same circumference as mine, it was obvious that, um, er, something wasn't right. The majority of my bust line girth is in front, not distributed as evenly around my body as it is on the form. This necessitated some improvisation on my part to make the dummy resemble me more closely. Once again, no remarks, please.

Thus, the bra and its *amplifications*:

Yup. Stuffed with plastic bags. I first thought of using a couple breast prostheses, but a quick check on eBay revealed they cost more than I wanted to pay, like, $50. Not worth it, no matter how realistic they are. Hence, the plastic bag boobs. Yay, me!

* * * * *

As Chris suggested I applied my google fu to yesterday's snapping turtle question and discovered that they mate from April to November and lay eggs from May to October. Those periods of mating and egg-laying are shorter here in the Great Frozen North, but I guess my question is answered. They mate whenever the the spirit moves them and the temperature is warmer than, say, 50 degrees, and then they lay their eggs. There. Now we know.

Eye candy Friday: Wisconsin roadsides.

Something I have loved for many years is about Wisconsin, and particularly about northern Wisconsin, that they (whoever they are) do not feel compelled to mow the roadsides. This is in direct contrast to their counterparts in Minnesota, who seem offended by unshorn rights-of-way. Consequently, many of Wisconsin's roadsides and ditches grow a diversity of plant life -- wildflowers, grasses, small shrubs -- which in turn foster a variety of insect and bird life. I took all these photos along the 2-mile stretch of paved township road that leads from the gravel road around our lake to the state highway.

Let's start with some of the more common wildflowers. Actually, all of these are common. Some are just more common than others.

Clockwise from upper left: common yarrow (white) with some kind of black-eyed Susan/sunflower behind it, mullein (yellow) with ox-eye daisies behind it; and a bunch of ox-eye daisies with a happy fritillary butterfly in the middle.

Other common roadside wildflowers:

Clockwise, again: daylilies; creeping bellflower; Canada thistle; yarrow and red clover.

With the exception of the yellow daisy-like flower in the first photo, all of those flowers are exotics, either introduced or escaped from gardens. The ones that follow are natives.

Woodland sunflower, looking rather bedraggled because we had had a tumultuous thunderstorm with 60 mph straight-line winds the night before.

Summersweet, of the spirea family. The flowers are the conical spires near the bottom of the photo; the skinny spikes are some kind of grass seed heads:

Wild bergamot (Monarda fisulosa), first cousin to the bee balm in your garden. The flowers are normally bright lavender, but these were pale and washed out for some reason. The Indians used to make tea from the leaves. I tried it one year but was not impressed:

Tick trefoil, so called because the foliage is three-leaved and the crescent-shaped seeds are covered with minute velcro-like hooks that enable them to cling to pant legs and animal fur:

Spreading dogbane (I have no idea how it spreads nor why it is bane to dogs):

The first few years we were here I was disappointed that there were no wild roses in the roadsides. Then one year I spotted a clump a few miles north. In the last couple years they have started to appear along our road:

Fireweed, so called because it is often one of the first plants to reseed and bloom after a fire:

Milkweeds -- common, beloved of the Monarch butterfly larva; marsh; and butterfly weed:

I take credit for this butterfly weed growing wild at the end of our gravel road. I had planted some several years ago in a xeriscapic garden in our front yard, but that garden is now largely under the new deck. Since this is the only butterfly weed I have seen anywhere in Polk County and it is growing a half mile from where I used to have it, it seems a safe guess that it grew from a seed that originated in my garden. Yay, me.

I used to have marsh milkweed growing in another flower garden in a spot where rain water from the roof tended to accumulate. It attracted dozens of little black butterflies every year. But it grows wild in lots of damp areas, so I cannot take credit for it.

As lovely as wildflowers are, the grasses that grow in the roadsides have their own kind of subtle beauty. I have discovered that adding a few stems of grasses with seedheads makes a flower arrangement look better, more sophisticated.

 

There used to be a few patches of both little and big bluestem grasses along the road, but I haven't seen them this year. One of the things about wild plants is that any given year will be different than the year before and the next year will be different again.

This next thing is kinda scary. I took this photo over a week ago, so it was early July. Very early July.

That is goldenrod, people. Goldenrod is an end-of-summer, early fall flower. Why is it blooming in early July? Did our late spring freak it out so much it decided to go directly to autumn, do not pass go, do not collect $200? Weird. But like I said, nature is not necessarily consistent year to year.

Finally, here is a blue flag growing by our dock. I planted this one myself, but they are native to the area.

Spring, part the third.

For all the glory that is spring in the north woods, there are some less than delightful bits.

I think this guy must have spent his winter burrowed deep into the duff on the floor of the woods. Now he is on our deck railing getting a tan. I let him be; no critter, no matter how capable of giving me a nasty ouch, deserves to be swatted after surviving the winter. Unless it is a mosquito; then all bets are off.

Other less than savory aspects of spring are the wood and deer ticks.

Lower left, something called a star tick, which we do not have here. Middle, an adult female deer tick -- those are the ones that transmit Lyme disease. Upper right, adult wood tick, aka dog tick. I found this photo online and stole it because I couldn't find the ones I took last spring of the eight wood ticks I pulled off Hannibal The Fearless Who Fancies Himself To Be An Outdoor Cat.

Like many things in nature, the tick population varies from year to year. Last year we were inundated with ticks. Boo! Hiss! This year, they are almost non-existent. Yay! I think I have found fewer than half a dozen so far this year, which is, I think, a record low for this date.

Despite that, for the past couple days I have felt them crawling on me everywhere. I have not found a single one for over a week, however, so I attribute this annoyance to an over-active tactile sense.

There are the ubiquitous mosquitoes, vector of the West Nile virus:

Don't worry, we shooed that one away before it bit my boy.

There are other less-than-wonderful aspects of warmer weather. Follow the link if you want to see an over-40 woman wearing a too-young-for-her, way-too-short garment while doing her exercise walk. She was doing laps around the block Saturday while we were stuck for a couple hours with what turned out to be a broken timing belt on the Aveo. I probably shouldn't be snarky; she was, after all, very trim and was doing a good thing. She had just made an unfortunate wardrobe choice.

To remove that last image from your eyeballs, here is a sign on the wall of the diner where we had a very tasty brunch that day, right before we discovered that the car wouldn't start.

I had to pay for my coffee, darn. No gossip to trade.

* * * * *

Thanks to everyone who chimed in with advice on yesterday's post about the Summer Chevron sweater. There is a l-o-n-g thread over in Ravelry (special thanks to those of you who told me to check there) that details all the trials and tribulations of that pattern. Apparently it has a wacky row gauge that no one can achieve, and the deep V neck tends to become a wide V when worn. I am still undecided about whether to attempt it with my bamboo yarn, but now I know where to go for more help. Thanks, guys! You are the best!

* * * * *

As much as I love having #1 son home for a couple months, it has been driving me absolutely NUTS that his computer seems to hog our DSL connection. I have forbade him from using BitTorrent -- or downloading anything -- between the hours of 8 am and 1 pm, which is my preferred internet time. But even though he has been completely cooperative about our agreement, sometimes my connection gets so slow it is impossible to do anything. Every single page gets the "Cannot find www.xyz.com. Please check your spelling..." message.

Today I got so frustrated that while he was out for his daily run and clearly not using his computer, I went downstairs to his bedroom to see what was open on his Mac Pro. I discovered that the problem seems to be that Skype, even when just sitting there with a chat window open but not being used, continues to hog our internet connection. I closed Skype, came back upstairs, and walla! my internet connection was fine. Hurrah! Too bad we didn't figure this out a month ago; he leaves to go back to NY a week from Sunday, and I had been counting the days.

Spring, part deux.

The rites of spring include kitties in the window,

   

turtles sunning on a log,

 

and the ritual burning of the Christmas wreath.

I stepped in

To a burning ring of fire.

It went round, round, round,

And the flames went higher.

And it burns, burns, burns

The ring of fire,

The ring of fire.

Well. That was fun.

* * * * *

Dramatis personae included:

• Maggie of the matches.
• Andrew of the daring fire handling.
• Matthew of the warming hands (displaying his new watch).
• Kat of the camera.

Spring comes to the north woods.

May 13, 2008.

May 14, 2008:

May 16, 2008:

May 18, 2008:

May 20, 2008:

...and it's about damned time.

For the non-naturalists among you, those are trillium (T. grandiflorum), trillium, trillium, elderberry (Sambucus canadensis), trillium, and -- you guessed it! -- more trillium, this time with a tiny side of violets (the blurry purple blotches at back right).

The trillium are fading now.

June 1, 2008.

The white flowers turn pinkish-mauve as they fade.

The purple violets are largely done, but now we have yellow flowers.

Yes, dandelions, of course, but what I really meant were the tiny yellow violets at the left.

Tomorrow we examine some other aspects of spring. Class dismissed.

* * * * *

I took all these photos in the narrowish band of woods between our house and our neighbors'. If you look very, very closely at the upper left corner of the fifth photo you can see a tiny bit of our neighbor's green LP tank; at the upper right you can see some of his house, happily painted a low-key shade of light brown. I hate it when someone plants a suburban-looking house in the woods and paints it blue or yellow or pink.

This area of woods is carpeted in trillium every spring, and every year it delights me anew. The woods on the other side of the house are more predominantly coniferous (if I were a really good blogger I would go out there right now and identify those conifers. Sorry, too lazy.) and are not good trillium habitat.  But there are largish swatches of forest that I pass every time I drive into town to pick up a gallon of milk or a book at the library or even to go to crunch some tax forms in The Big City. And I feel so, so lucky to live here every time I do that.

I is for icefishing.

Not.

 

Admit it, I had ya goin' there for a second, didn't I?

But while we are on the subject of ice, how about this?

As that picture loaded I expected the captions to mention the ice auger sticking out of the kitty's right ear. But, no, apparently the frozn harbls were funnier.

Posting, with a time limit.

I have much to tell y'all, but I only have three hours and nineteen, er, eighteen minutes before the intertubes close up again. Ready, set, go!

Since Andrew got home from Chiapas and set up his new computer he has been BitTorrent-ing like crazy -- all the episodes of Battlestar Galactica he missed and every album released during his absence. Or so it seems. My poor little Mac Mini cannot compete in the War For Our Bandwidth; it times out at least 80% of the time that I click on a link. I finally insisted that Andrew release our DSL to me from 8:30 to noon every day. Which is why I have a deadline to finish this post. Three hours and, um, fourteen minutes left.

What to tell you about first? How about what we had for dinner yesterday? Æbleskiver!

What are æbleskiver? You may very well ask. I could not possibly comment.*

[frustration] Even though I am writing this during the time when Andrew's downloads are limited to 10K/sec, my MM continues to time out over half the time. Go to Plan B: do the blog post using my Work Laptop (which continutes to reside with me so I can take every available CPE credit available free through my employer). For some reason the WL doesn't seem to have nearly as much trouble sharing the DSL connection. But in order to do that I have to copy the photos I have taken since the last blog post to my thumb drive, then copy them to the laptop. Argh, my 64MB thumb drive only has 3MB free, and even though I delete every frickin' file that is on it, Mac Finder still tells me there is not enough room to copy anything. Go to Plan B1: run downstairs and ask Andrew he has a thumb drive and can I borrow it, please. He's not in his room (must have gone for his morning run), but his laptop is downloading on his desk; I pause all his downloads to see if that will help. Run back upstairs, try the MM; nope, no better. Play solitaire while allowing blood pressure to drop to normal levels. Idea: maybe Andrew isn't out running, maybe he is in the bathroom. Check, discover this is the case. Ask about thumb drives; yes, he has two, a 512MB and a 128MB. He fetches them for me upon emerging from bathroom. Bigger thumb drive turns out to have <100MB free; smaller one locks up my MM. Return both to Andrew, ask if he can delete anything on the larger one and free up some space. He does, returns it to me. I copy photos from MM to thumb drive to work laptop. Whew. [/frustration]

Where was I? Oh, yeah, what are æbelskiver? Let's let the experts tell us:

 

I love that they compare the size to a very large hailstone.

ETA: Upon rereading this post I find I have done what Andrew calls "burying the lead." Æbleskiver, as it says in the newpaper ad above, are Danish pancakes. Onward.

So Andrew and I hustle on over to West Denmark at 5 pm (me thinking that this is a good time, the early rush will be over and the chronic late-comers won't have arrived yet) and discover there are roughly a gazillion cars parked along the country road in front of the hall. We go in, buy our tickets, and find we are numbers 240 and 241; a few moments later they call numbers 150 to 160 to come downstairs and eat. So we have some time to wait. What a time to have forgotten my knitting.

But there is entertainment. I encounter another county board member whom I have been meaning to call about a resolution which he is bringing before the board at the next meeting. We chat for awhile, and he explains his thinking to me.

More time to wait. I think I'll show you a bit of the hall where we waiting.

The Danes were a sea-going people:

 

I always thought Leif Ericsen's name was spelled Erikson and that he was from Norway. That is probably because there were far more people of Norwegian than Danish heritage where I grew up in southern Minnesota.

There was music:

 

But best of all, there was æbleskiver-making.

 

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

 

Yep, very large hailstones, all right.

There were two stoves and two crews making the hailst--, er, æbleskiver. Crew One, above; Crew Two, below:

 

That's Mike, Andrew's friend and mentor and hero in the green "Got Luck?" t-shirt. Mike is a long-time peace activist. He's an organic farmer and a substitute teacher and coach and speaker. He was arrested in his younger days for throwing blood on the White House; he has traveled to the Mideast multiple times, once meeting with Yassar Arafat. More recently he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives on the Green Party ticket, opposing Rep. Dave Obey -- one of the more liberal Democrats in the House -- from the left. (He got 27,00o+ votes: Dave, take note.) He is also the person most likely to help out with any kind of local volunteer/fund-raising effort; his wife Barb was working in the downstairs kitchen. They are dear, dear, very idealistic people.

The æbleskiver batter was mixed in the downstairs kitchen and rushed upstairs in handy buckets carried by the kids of Crew Two:

 

Cooking/baking æbleskiver is a labor-intensive business. Each person on the cooking crew tended one 7-æbleskiver iron, except for the real experts, who tended two. First, a squirt of oil into each large-hailstone-sized indentation in the pan, then a ladleful of batter. As soon as the bottom of the æbleskiver cooked, the crewperson turned it a quarter-turn using a special skewer:

 

The cooking and turning would continue until the outside of the æbleskiver was the perfect shade of brown. Sometimes the crewperson wasn't paying close enough attention and an æbleskiver would get too brown, even black. The rejects were tossed into the bowl in the center of the stove; you can just see the edge of it in the above photo. After I took these pictures the crew let me steal a couple of the rejects for Andrew and I to sample. Mmmmm, even the rejects were good!

Eventually our numbers were called and we trouped downstairs to the eating area. Because I was very hungry and not as good a blogger as I could have been, I have exactly zero pictures of the actual dinner. Instead, I will use my words: we were each given a plate with 3 æbleskiver and a 4" link of medisterpolse (Danish sausage, mild, about 1" in diameter, and tasting distinctly of cloves). There was a pitcher of water, a thermal carafe of coffee, a small pitcher of warm syrup, and a bowl of sodsuppe (fruit soup) on every table. I had had fruit soup once about thirty years ago and remembered it as being kinda yucky, but I found it quite tasty yesterday. It's made with dried fruit stewed in (sweetened?) water, probably with some spices, and served cold. I'd never had the sausage before, but I'd like to have it again. Soon.

Happily this was an all-you-can-eat kind of dinner because three æbleskiver and a hunk of sausage is not nearly enough to fill one up. Æbleskiver taste pretty much like regular pancakes, only lighter. Three of them equal about one medium-sized ordinary pancake. We -- Andrew and I and the three other people at our table -- kept asking for and getting additional bowls of æbleskiver. We didn't push our luck by asking for more sausage, darn.

Oh, yes, there was dessert, too. Our choice of apple crisp or a lemon chiffon thingie. We Scandinavians really like our sweets.

This is purportedly a knitting blog, and if I were any kind of decent knitblogger I would have photos to show you of the lovely Norwegian sweaters that I saw. You will just have to make do with this instead.

 

* Anyone know where that quote is from?  I don't think googling will help you; it didn't give me any results, but I know where I remember it from so that's okay.

Random Wednesday.

* The spring peepers woke up today. Smokey said he listened for them yesterday, and they weren't peeping.  But tonight, as we drove to the barbecue place in the next town north, we heard them. And stopped to roll down our windows and listen. Such a glorious sound. Ahhhhh. It was nice of them to wait to come out of hibernation until I truly had a day off.

* Monday was my last day at work. I left at 5:05, stopped at Best Buy to compare cameras, and headed for the Great North. Home by 9pm, in bed by 10. Ahhhhh. Life is good.

* Tuesday was the all-day organizational meeting of the new county board, of which I am 1/23rd. Good meeting, got acquainted with some of the supervisors whom I didn't know, and got myself elected to the finance committee, which was what I wanted. I won't be writing much, if at all, about the board here. It is not appropriate. But I'm thinking I might start a second blog for that topic; time will tell.

* I did knit during the meeting, although not all the time. The project of choice was a sock, but, less than optimally, I was at the turning of the heel. It is a short-row heel, which I have never managed to pull off correctly before, so why I thought I could do it while in a meeting that demanded some attention is a mystery for the universe. I knit half the heel, frogged it, knit it halfway again, frogged it, tried one more time. It wasn't too bad that time so I kept going. After finishing it and knitting a few more rows I inspected it at the end of the meeting and decided that I shall frog it one last time and reknit it, this time when there are absolutely no distractions. And it shall be perfecto. It is a gift for another, after all.

* Wednesday, my first real day off: got up at 8:30, made coffee, caught up (sort of) on e-mail and online stuff, then got sleepy again. Back to bed for a... six-hour nap! I hope to cut back on the nap time a little tomorrow.

* I just flipped a hornet off my hand. Where did he come from? No idea, but he ain't gonna live to see the sunrise.

* My house is a total disaster. Every horizontal surface, including most of the floors, is covered with stuff, and there is a suspicious odor of dog and/or cat *accident*. Must attack all of that, one area at a time.

* The Mason-Dixon dog blanket (scroll down for a photo) is suddenly three-quarters done. How did that happen? I never knit on it for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time, and not very often at that. Oh, yeah, now I remember: we knitters are taking over the world, one stitch at a time.

Chuckles and smiles for your entertainment.

 

Seen at the boat landing on Big Butternut Lake on election day, perhaps because it was recently hauled off the lake after being used as an ice-fishing house all winter. No comment.

* * * * *

I managed to capture this photo one morning on the way to work. Notice the advertisement on the back of the black van, then notice the kind of van it is. You may need to click to embiggen so you can read it clearly.

 

Huh?

* * * * *

The following are not chuckles, but rather things to make you smile: sweaters observed at Yellow Dog Knits in Eau Claire when I was there for Franklin's 1,000 Knitters photo shoot.

Luscious cables (I love cables. Must knit cables)...

 

and fantastic (intarsia?) stripes (I love stripes. Must knit tweedy stripes.):

  :

Great Frozen North, redux (again).

I spotted this sign on Sunday afternoon on Main Street in Luck, the little town north of us.

The sign was next to this.

 

I wonder if the ice palace is lit from within like the ones that grace the St. Paul Winter Carnival on select years. Probably not; St. Paul has around 280,000 residents, and Luck has about 1,200.

Still, I wish I could have watched when the good people of Luck were building it. Did people make the ice blocks in their home freezers, or did the local butcher shop offer the use of their walk-in freezer? Who assembled the blocks? Did the village hire professionals, or was it a community event, with beer in the streets and a cherry picker for the upper levels and everyone in town offering advice? Or was it accomplished by a dedicated team of local ice nerds fantasizing their previously unknown architectural talents, who held meetings and drew plans and built scale models and argued about buttresses and fanciful colored ice? And how many times did they have to put that cross on top before it stayed?

What I did on my summer vacation Sunday.

Hmmmm. Where does this trail lead?

It leads to this little shed at the edge of the lake, between our house and the neighbor's.

What's going on? Poles and a shovel?

Ice augers?

People on the ice?

It is...

(ta da!) the Annual Turning On Of The Aerator.

I already knew what was going on. Got an e-mail a few days ago asking if I would help. "Aerator party at 12 noon on Sunday." Got another, somewhat panicked, email the next day. "Aerator party rescheduled for 10 am Sunday. PACKER GAME AT NOON! CANNOT HAVE CONFLICT! PRIORITIES, PEOPLE!"

The aeration system in our lake is to prevent freeze-out. For those of you who do not live in The Great Frozen North, let me 'splain.

Actually, before we get too far, let me explain what freeze-out is, for anybody who hasn’t experienced it. It doesn’t mean the ice freezes all the way from top to bottom: it means the lake gets low in oxygen during heavy snow years. When snow cover is sufficient to limit sunlight penetration, you don’t have photosynthesis occurring. Everything dies under the ice. Weeds die and consume oxygen, and without sunlight, oxygen isn’t replenished in the system. Eventually, fish die off, too, because there isn’t enough oxygen to sustain them.

This is not a problem in deep lakes, but our lake is only 20 feet deep at its deepest point and about ten to twelve feet deep in the rest. It is deep enough for boating and swimming and floating and sunbathing and sitting-on-the-deck-admiring-the-view, but susceptible to freeze-out in years of deep snow pack, like this year.

The solution was to install an aeration system, which was done in the late 1980s after the last freeze-out. That little shed houses air pumps, and there are five or six good-sized (~6" diameter) pipes running out about a hundred feet or so on the bottom of the lake. When the pumps are turned on, air is pumped out through the pipes, bubbling up through the water and keeping the surface free of ice. The large area of open water is a danger to snowmobilers, though, so we must also put up poles and ropes to mark off the area, plus a warning sign at the public access. The aeration system was funded by the state Department of Natural Resource, and its ongoing operation and maintenance are the responsibility of the lake association.

But the poles and ropes must go up before there is open water. Where exactly to put them?

Although Mike and Marcia, who have been in charge of this whole effort for the past several years, last September mapped approximately where the pipes end, it is difficult to judge precise distances and angles and where the heck exactly are those pipes anyway? So the first step today, after turning on the pumps, was to drill some pilot holes. Any holes that had air bubbles coming up were winners; they were located over -- or very close to over -- the air outlets.

(No, we don't drill the pilot holes at the bank. I got a late start taking photos, so the holes were all drilled and the poles and rope up before I thought to get my camera. What you get is a re-creation, sort of.)

Success! See the bubbling water?

No? How about now?

Thar she blows!

The pilot holes were four inches in diameter.  After an hour or two the successful ones were a foot or two across; by 3 pm they were ten feet across. Within a day or two there will be an area of open water 50 to 100 feet in diameter. The bubblers really work.

[digression] One year it was a day or so after the aeration system was turned on before anyone was able to drill the pilot holes and put up the ropes. The air was trapped under the ice and came through wherever it could. One such place happened to be about ten feet off the shore in front of our house. I watched from my window as Lucy inspected the resulting hole. She would sniff around it suspiciously, then leap! back! when a mega-cluster of accumulated air bubbles caused the water to spout several feet into the air. It took about 30 seconds to a minute for enough air to gather and cause a spout, so she had plenty of time to sniff and investigate and wonder about the whole thing. This happened over and over. And over. Until I brought her in. [/digression]

After we had three successful holes that told us approximately where the open water would be, Mike walked off a perimeter around it. Jan and her daughter (Jan's husband John is pictured above with the ice auger) and I followed with a drill equipped with a 12-inch-long, 3/4-inch-diameter bit and with several bundles of seven-foot-tall plastic poles. Jan -- and later, daughter -- drilled holes into the snow and ice, and I stuck a pole into each one.  Marcia followed with a bucket of water scooped from the lake. She poured a dipper of water into each hole, where it would freeze and make the pole solid.

Our equipment:

What's that written on the sticks?

The last step was tying colorful warning tape along the length of the rope to make it more visible to snowmobilers.

There were some hazards, namely water and slush on top of the ice but hidden by the snow. When there is so much snow on the ice, the weight causes the ice to sag, and water seeps up through cracks in the ice. The insulating layer of snow prevents it from freezing unless the temperature drops really, really low. Which it hasn't for a couple weeks.

Walking Slogging through this:

leads to this:

 

When I got home I had to thaw my laces with a hair dryer in order to get my boots off.

It might look as though most of the work was done by the female portion of the crew, while the men stood around and watched.

This was most assuredly not true. What it demonstrates is the bias of the photographer and the timing of her photographs. Like I said, the rope was already up by the time I got my camera; that heavy job, plus others requiring impressive feats of upper body strength, were strategically allocated to the males.

We leave the poles and ropes in place until long after the ice has melted in the spring. They all float, and generally wash ashore right in front of our house. In May Matthew gathered up last year's efforts and tucked them into the shed until we needed them again.

And today, when the job was done?

 

 

Mmmm, chili and beer.

And football. If you weren't watching The Game, the final score was 31-31, Packers. Or some such; unlike the rest of the crew, I am not a football fan (I finished one preemie cap and started another).

In addition to The Game, we had other entertainment.

 

Marcia and Mike have four dogs, friendly tail-waggers and ball-chasers every one. This sweetie is Maurice, a collie-shepherd mix named for the former astronaut on Northern Exposure.

In addition to the indoor entertainment, this guy kept stopping by to whammer on the trees just outside the living room.

That's a pileated woodpecker. It's about the size of a crow. One impressive bird, yessireebob.

All in all, a very good day. Perfect weather, lots of help, and a little party afterward. Good times!

...not a creature was stirring...

It was a quiet Christmas. Matthew and I joined my friend Colleen and her friend Alan for a Christmas dinner put on by a local community club. No charge, goodwill offering only. It was held at a lovely, northwood-sy supper club in the next little town south from us. The lady in the Santa hat was in charge. She said they served 140 people.

Ham, stuffing with gravy, steamed mixed veggies, dinner rolls, and homemade cookies and bars(s) for dessert. Just like grandma used to make 'cuz it was Grandma in the kitchen.

See the TV in the bar in the background? Tuned to Channel 45, The Official Fireplace Station Of The Holidays -- all flickering flames, all the time. What was even more amazing was that [I think] the Packers game was being televised. "No, Lenny, we will NOT change the station to The Game. We're having a fireplace on the teevee today."

I saw Mr. S, who was Andrew's history teacher in high school and who commented that he has been reading The Boy's The Young Man's dispatches from Chiapas with interest. Mr. S looked very festive indeed.

After that we came home. Matthew bullied me into letting him open one present. Pink Skullcandy earbuds.

Then he listened to his music and surfed the net, and I listened to an audio book and knitted on his sock.

Hannibal helped. Mmmm, yarn...

Eye candy Friday. Literally.

When I visited my friend Kathy last weekend she was still in the process of emptying their store*, open only during the summer, of perishable merchandise. She told me to take as much candy as I wanted because otherwise it would be thrown away. Mmmmmm, candy...

* * * * *
Some more eye candy from my visit with her. She and her husband live in the woods on a lake. They have a tame deer which they have named Lucy and who has come to their house daily for 2-1/2 years, although only in the winter.

Yes, Lucy comes for the treats.

Notice the Calorimetry and Noro striped scarf Kathy is wearing, above :-)

* Their store is slightly larger than this one:

Anybody wanna buy a flea?

Editor's note: I wrote this in September. Why didn't I post it then? No idea. Here it is, a slice of rural life on a beautiful fall day. My thermometer reads today the same as it did t'other day -- cold. Icy cold. This post is a breath of warmer air. Since I am packing for a weekend trip to visit a couple of old friends, it was serendipitous to find this post ready to go.

* * * * *

The weather is cool and I wanted to make vegetable soup, so a few weeks ago I headed to the flea market on Saturday morning. There are always some produce vendors there so I figured I could get some fall veggies, no problem.

Unfortunately, the season is nearing a close. Lots of empty tables.

In July there would have been tables of stuff all the way back to the trees. I once bought a couple bakery-quality sheet pans at a stand back by the trees for practically nothing. Ah, good times.

\

Even in the few stands that were open, I found some interesting sights.

Tires, cheap:

Coca Cola, although somewhat less than fresh:

Decorative buttons for your Crocs:

Spinners! Only $1! Wanna go fishing for walleye?

Flea markets and estate sales are excellent places to acquire yard and garden tools on the cheap. You know your brand-new shiny $25 rake will look like these in a couple months anyway:

I have no idea what these are for. They are about four feet tall and have some kind of hinge or mounting thingies on the back:

Need a generator or some luggage?

How about some not-so-gently-used bowling pins?

I have no idea what this flag is saying:

nor even what country it is. It resembles the flag of Egypt but is not exactly the same. Anybody know?

Finally I found the produce stand, but it was strangely lacking in anything resembling local produce.

Pineapples and Red Delicious apples? Nope.

We already have about 20 pounds of tomatoes. Kiwi, no thanks, not in vegetable soup.

Bananas? I repeat, not in vegetable soup, thanks.

This looks like it might be local:

Well, the honey and maybe the jams, but not the cinnamon. And it still isn't what I'm looking for.

This stand  had the only local produce I found:

The proprietor didn't speak English so he could only wave his hands over the many varieties of peppers (more than in the photo) and say, Hot! Hot! which