Well, here we are hanging yesterday’s popcorn strings on the tree. This was a hard shot to get; the kids were bouncing back and forth between Mom, The Dispenser of All Correct Ornaments, and the tree, tripping over each other in the process. So they’re a little blurry. But the tree is done, the rooms …

From left: Katie, Natalie (sorry about your head, Nat), Becca, and Abby string popcorn for the tree Well as you might have guessed, I took a few days off of work last week for the Thanksgiving holiday (as you might have done too). My parents were visiting for the last time before they leave for …

These trees grew on our mountainside in the sunshine and rain during their dozen years of life. They were brought down by weather or a chain saw, coming though the quiet woods to thin out the stands of weak timber to let sunshine reach the ground again. Their branches and sawdust went back into the …

Well, the glass is finally on the greenhouse. Yahoo! All I have to do now is finish wrapping it with plastic sheeting to keep the snow out of it. You can see that we’ve put our bikes and various other summer paraphernalia in there to keep them out of the snow; but later on this …

Do you ever get tired of making breakfast? I sure do. I have 35 minutes every weekday to get something made for 9 people so I can send half of them out the door with a full stomach. Breakfast can’t be very fancy in that amount of time, and I have a couple of picky …

Of the Yeeeeeeeeeeeear! We’ve had the Christmas music on, we’ll set up the Christmas tree a week from tomorrow (we always do, the day after Thanksgiving), and the weather has complied by sending snow. Jess called this afternoon and said we had two new inches. (This picture was from the other day.) Yahoo! Not to …

Remember the flying deer? Let’s see, that was in May, and this being November it was high time to get Dexter The Battered Red Honda in for some surgery. I got a new fender and hood from a wrecking yard a month ago, and they’ve just been leaning on the wood pile awaiting my pleasure; …

Remember the giganto-pumpkin that was hogging up the mud room floor? Jessica attacked it the other day. She sliced it into chunks as big as her hand, boiled the chunks (in three separate pots), skinned ‘em, and gave them to her trusty assistant (me) to mush ‘em up. I did so, because most of the …

Yes, it’s true; you can freeze milk. We do it every time we buy it, since we go through so much (about four gallons a week) and we’re so far from the grocery store. Local cow’s milk is prohibitively expensive ($4 a gallon!), and we’re not willing to spring for a goat we’d have to …

Jessica made a run to town this morning so she’s not around to post her entry for the Friday Recipe. (She had to go to Costco so the checkout guy could look at her haul and smirk “Stockin’ up for the end of the world?” Correct answer: “We have a big family and we live …