Weekend Update

Cookie Jar Ginger Snaps

Holiday baking has commenced.  Two Swedish Tea Rings dropped off, and the and second round of Cookie Jar Ginger Snaps are ready to go.  I love the smell of the house during the holidays.

Rolled in sugar

Hot out of the oven

We had about 1/2 an inch of rain the other night - the horses were all proper mudballs in the morning, but the ground and all the vegetation is surely happier for it.  I wouldn't have minded if it had kept up for all of the next day, too.  Unfortunately it didn't.  The horses weren't entirely pleased to be kept penned up in the corral with hay until afternoon to give the orchard pasture a chance to dry some.  Every time the house door swung open Sunny would whinny notifying us that, "Hey, you've forgotten us down here!  We want out!"


It was still damp even yesterday when I went down to snip off some more spindly trees along the orchard fenceline.  I'm making progress - I've done most of the way to the barn now, although there's still work for T to do with the chainsaw.

Cat 1 joined me to supervise, yammering away the whole time.  He's nothing if not vocal.  He's still a youngster, definitely a tom, and was likely someone's pet at some point.  He worked his way closer and closer and finally got up the courage...

Once he'd had his ears rubbed I couldn't keep him out from underfoot - I almost dropped a tree on him a couple times.  Finally the horses came over to check out what I was up to and after Sunny snuffled him over and got slobber on him and Thunder almost flattened him, he retreated under the pear tree to complain at the lot of us.

Cat 2 is still running off whenever he spots us getting closer than 20 feet or so, and there's an even shyer, big fluffy grey cat that showed up briefly over the weekend.  Finding some outside cats is not going to be a problem.... keeping track of them all, however....

I have the majority of the tub surround tiled, along with the sink backsplash.  Hopefully we'll have a working shower before company arrives for the holidays, but it still has to be grouted, so we'll see.

Last night when we went down to bring the horses in, only Amyra and Rufus appeared.  T called, I called... finally a crashing and thudding, and the errant pair trotted up over the edge of the creekbed both with grass still hanging out of their mouths.  So at least a couple of them have figured out there's edible stuff down there. 

This morning all of them but Amyra were standing in the barn when I went down to let them out, so they've figured that out, too. 

T pulled the cover off one of the old well pits yesterday so we could see how deep it is.  Fairly deep, with a bit of water in the bottom from the rain.  And it also had snakes.  T says just corn snakes. 

They eat mice and bugs and aren't poisonous.  But I still wouldn't want to run across one unexpectedly, and I sure won't be picking them up. 

They look a bit too much like rattlers at first glance.  And I'm not sure what the green one is.

And that's the news from here for the last couple of days.