Christmas mathematics

1 indoor duck + 1 fresh cut Christmas tree + tree stand full of water = 1 wet duck + puddles on the floor

Minna has, for the last several weeks since the weather turned cold and wet, been living the high life indoors. She spends her days on the couch, eats her meals in the bathroom and sleeps on the floor in a puppy pen in my room at night. She is nearing 12 years old now and has trouble getting around and is no longer waterproof so living outside just isn't safe for her right now. She and Maggie used to live inside at night all the time, wearing diapers and hanging out in the bunny room but spending their days outdoors when they were younger but this is the first time that she has spent her days indoors as well. She gets along well with the other animals and the dogs tend to give her space so she is trusted to stay in the living room on the couch (with puppy pads down) during the daytime. 

She'll sometimes get off the couch and wander into the bathroom looking for food or a drink but for the most part she stays put so imagine my surprise today when I came home from work (walking a dog) to find her sitting in my purse on the floor in the living room. I picked her up to put her back on the couch and discovered that she was soaking wet. I knew I hadn't given her a bath so where did she find the water? Following the puddles of water led me to the base of the Christmas tree. Minna had, somehow, figured out that the tree stand the tree was sitting in was full of water and had taken herself a nice little bath, happily splashing water everywhere on the living room floor before heading over to preen herself in my purse. 

Ducks are much smarter than people usually give them credit for, I have found. Once they know an area has water or food they will continue to return to the area to check for food or water in the future. So now, along with our fairy lights, snowmen, and stockings that we decorate the house with it looks like I will have to add bunny gates to the list; placing them in the living room around the base of the tree just to keep Minna from taking any more baths there. Fortunately, I am adept at making bunny gates out of metal grids. I just hope Minna doesn't learn that she can push the gate aside like she does with her puppy pen as there is nothing that I can zip tie the gates to in order to keep them in place. She is nothing if not determined. 

Three cheese vegetable quiche

I've decided to ring in the new year of blogging with another quiche recipe, although this one is a bit lighter (I feel) than the previous one that I did back in - EEK!- August of 2018. Ahh, how time flies when you are busy procrastinating and taking care of 22 animals of assorted varieties. At any rate, this recipe was tested out on Christmas morning when I was forbidden from doing our usual breakfast of sticky buns, welsh pancakes with orange sauce, and baked eggs because we were planning on doing that the day after Christmas so that my sister and her fiance could partake and my mom said "absolutely not" to doing it two days in a row. She's in weight watchers and is, in general, a killjoy when it comes to the creation and consumption of tasty treats. I did modify this recipe a bit as it originally called for mushrooms and I tend to think of them as being very slug-like once cooked and, therefore, inedible. The general consensus was that it was a very good quiche so I am passing along the recipe to you, gentle reader.

Three cheese vegetable quiche

1 Pillsbury refrigerated pie crust, softened to room temperature
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 red onion, diced
1 cup milk (I used both whole milk and 2% and both quiches came out fine)
2 large handfuls (approximately 3-4 cups) fresh spinach, diced
1 teaspoon dried minced shallots (or onion)
3 egg whites, lightly beaten
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper 
1/2 cup Gouda cheese, shredded
1/2 cup smoked Gouda cheese, shredded
3/4 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Roll the pie crust out into a 9-inch glass pie pan and crimp the edges as needed. Prick the crust all over with a fork and bake for 10-12 minutes. Take out and set aside. 

While the pie shell is baking you can work on the filling. In a skillet, heat the vegetable oil and add the red onion and cook over medium high heat until tender, about 4 or 5 minutes. Let cool slightly.

In a large bowl, combine the milk, spinach, minced shallots or onion, egg whites, eggs, salt, and pepper and stir until all the ingredients are well mixed. Stir in the cooled onions, as well as the Gouda and Cheddar cheeses. Pour the whole mixture into the pre-baked pie shell and bake for 35-40 minutes, or until the center is puffed up and light golden brown. Let cool and set up for 10 minutes before serving. Serves 6.

Countdown to Christmas

Christmas is nearly here and I am, as usual, nowhere near ready. We have the tree set up and the house is - for the most part - decorated but that's about it. I am still frantically working on the fourth needlepoint Christmas stocking and am optimistic (if not realistic) that I will finish it in time for Christmas. 

Unfortunately I cannot devote all of my time to working on it because there are the usual Christmas tasks to take care of as well: make the candy, bake and decorate the cookies, shop for gifts and wrap them, deep clean the house, make the Christmas treats for the dogs, deliver food gifts to the neighbors, etc, etc. And then there is the daily life that goes on here on the Unfarm. The animals still need to be fed, watered and cared for, the dogs need to be walked, the chickens need to be let in and out of the coop each day, the eggs gathered from the nest boxes and the surprise nest at the back of the shed that we discovered the other day, the duck pools need to be cleaned and the duck diapers washed and dried, the rabbits let out daily and supervised so that they don't get into too much trouble, and the mouse cage cleaned out regularly to name a few. 

On top of all of that we have a winter storm warning for the area which could bring snow but will likely only bring freezing temperatures with my luck. Snow is one thing: it makes everything so fresh and white and quiet (and the dogs love to play in it) but ice or freezing temperatures is quite another - all that does is make life of the Unfarm more difficult. Walking the dogs becomes a hazard with the ice and the duck ponds freeze over which means Minna decides that she and Maggie will be staying in the house until the ponds thaw out, and the rabbit litter boxes start accumulating on the back deck because there is no way to clean them out with the hose frozen solid. In my humble opinion, if you are going to have the inconvenience of freezing temperatures you should at least have the fun of snow, but then the weather never asks for my opinion.

A few updates from the Unfarm, in case you are interested: Lucy is still insisting on sleeping in the little coop by herself. We are beginning to think that maybe she just gets stuck out in the yard after dark and heads to the nearest shelter instead of trying to fly over the fence to get to the regular coop. And Ginger shows no signs of being willing to bond with Sprout, and her weight loss is - much like my own - slow going. Sigh.

On stubbornness, needlepoint, and rabbits

In January of 2015 I ordered five Christmas stocking needlepoint kits and started working on them. I was smart. I planned ahead. I would have all of them ready by Christmas that year. I vastly overestimated my needlepoint abilities. We are coming up on Christmas 2016 and I still have two and a half stockings to go. Not that I'm giving up. No, I am stubbornly working away on the stockings with the misguided faith that by some miracle I will finish them this year. In all reality they won't be completed until Christmas eve of 2017 but my only options are to keep working on them or to give up completely and like I said: I'm stubborn. So that's what I've been doing lately. Needlepoint. Which I think must actually be Latin for "lots of work for very little results."

What does this mean for life on the Unfarm? Not much has changed other than that all this time spent in the bunny room, combined with the loss of Jojo, means that Ginger gets to spend the whole day out of her house hanging out in the room with me. She mostly chills in the duck area during the day and spends the evening exploring the room, collecting dust bunnies on her whiskers from the corners and behind the door.

Ginger hangs out on top of one of the art bins.

Ginger nibbling on my pants.

Recipe for disaster

This post is long overdue. I really should have written it a few weeks ago but school has kept me too busy to write anything until now. Okay, okay - it wasn't really school, it was a combination of procrastination, napping, and writer's block - but saying it was school sounds so much better than admitting the truth. At any rate, back on New Years I promised a post about yet another mishap involving Buddy, and it is time to deliver. Here goes.

For Christmas, I decided that instead of buying yet another treat dispensing ball for the dogs, I would simply skip the middle man and give them treats as their gift. But this was Christmas - I couldn't just give them the same treats I make all year, it had to be special. The solution I came up with was to make them little peanut butter, dog-bone-shaped cookies and drizzle them with carob. (This, by the way, did not turn out so great - the drizzle didn't hold to the cookies strongly enough and it tended to chip off when the treats rubbed against other treats and/or the bag I had them in.) After making several bags of treats, I still had a considerable amount of carob chips left over and had decided to use the rest of them (as they were human-grade) in chocolate chip cookies. At the time, however, the pantry was already full with all the other ingredients for the Christmas baking season so I left them on the kitchen table, along with whatever else couldn't be crammed into the cupboards. I did, however, take care to keep all edibles (as we always do) in the center of the table and thus out of reach of any dogs (read: Buddy).

Alas, it was a recipe for disaster. Buddy, having sniffed the carob out, I'm sure, managed to somehow get to the chips in the center of the table (I'm still not entirely sure how he reached them... we really should put cameras in the kitchen to monitor this kind of thing) and take his prize into the living room to enjoy it at his leisure. And enjoy it he did, eating almost all of it. Unfortunately for him, his enjoyment would turn out to be short lived as it seems that eating approximately three cups of carob chips is a bit much, even for Buddy. I came home later and noticed Kita licking something off the living room carpet. Upon closer inspection it turned out that it was the remains a pile of carob and dog food pieces that Buddy had vomited all over the floor (there is, apparently, no accounting for taste in dogs - they eat the grossest things sometimes.) Further investigation revealed that Buddy had also vomited another huge pile of the disgusting concoction all over my bed. Needless to say, Buddy went to bed without dinner that night. (Honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was add fuel to the fire - giving his stomach a break from food seemed the wisest course of action at that point.)

(As for the carob chips: I have yet to make any more attempts to experiment with carob, and don't foresee any in the near future.)

Sigh

Note: Forgive the delay, I started this post before Christmas, but with all the last minute shopping and spending time with my family, I wasn't able to get it posted until now.

It is, unfortunately, almost Christmas. This is unfortunate for two reasons, first, the sooner Christmas comes, the sooner it goes and all that's left is dreary, gray, wet winter; and second, I am - once again - nowhere near being ready. Why does that sound so familiar? Perhaps because I went through the same thing last year. The difference is that this year I have very little help with all the baking. And I got a much later start than I would have liked, due to the fact that I was slogging my way through a depressingly thick microbiology textbook and trying to cram the common names, scientific names, and identifying features of a huge list of deciduous plants. All this studying left very little time for doing anything. I think the only people less excited about all my schoolwork were the animals. The dogs were lucky if I managed to walk them once a week, the bunnies rarely got their usual time out in the evenings, and the ducks... who am I kidding - the ducks are exceedingly adept at getting whatever they want so my studying didn't bother them a bit.

The other task that fell by the wayside was keeping up on this blog. So, since I know everyone has been clamoring for an update (all one or two people who read this blog), I will oblige. There is nothing new to report with Kita and Maia, which is usually a case of no news is good news at this point: it means that their arthritis isn't getting any worse and their health is holding fairly steady. Kita is, however, on more pain medication in addition to his Rimadyl which seems to have made him a bit more playful, but he's still dragging by the end of our walks. But, despite his convincing performance of utter exhaustion, I am still not entirely sure that he's telling the truth. He always seems to be able to get up the energy for a second wind whenever he finds himself out without a leash or able to find a hole in the fence. As for Buddy, he temporarily acquired the unflattering nickname of "conehead." This was due to the fact that he managed - somehow - to rip a quarter sized piece of skin off the front of his shoulder which required stitches to patch it up (resulting in yet another vet bill, but on the plus side, they are naming the new wing of their building after us). And to keep Buddy from picking at his stitches, he was required to wear one of those plastic e-collars, hence the conehead nickname. He bore it tolerably well, though and after two weeks he was able to shed both the collar and the nickname.

Aspen is overjoyed that my brother - who had left for a month to visit relatives in another state - is back at home as this means that he will once again be getting decent milk. I should mention that the milk I give Aspen is the exact same milk that my brother gives him, but Aspen is convinced that what I have poured him is sub-par milk. He will drink almost anything my brother pours him, but should I make the mistake of pouring him anything less than half-and-half he looks at me like I'm trying to feed him dog food or something equally absurd. He will, however, grudgingly accept whipped cream from a can, cream, and eggnog from me. Mynx is easier to please and is quite content as long as the cable box with her blanket on top stays warm.

The chickens are finally out of trouble. A couple weeks back they were regularly staying out at night instead of going into their coop. This then necessitates an in-the-slippery-mud-and-pitch-dark chase of the chickens around the yard - a chase that the chickens nearly always win, being much smaller than us and therefore able to dart under the deck and wiggle around bushes much faster than we can. After several nights of slogging around in the dark after the chickens I grounded them to their run for a few days and that seems to have cured them of their rebellious attitude: they are now going into the coop on their own once it begins to get dark.

Things continue much the same with the rabbits: Jojo hates TJ. TJ hates Jojo, but gets along with Suki. Suki loves Jojo, tolerates TJ, and hates Clover. Clover spends all his time out of the cage marking every spot that Jojo has marked but is otherwise prevented from having any contact with TJ, Suki and Jojo by an elaborate system of gates and blockades. All attempts at bonding the rabbits are temporarily on hold, but I am hoping to start up again soon as their hormone levels will be lower during the winter (or so I am told - we'll have to see if that really makes the bonding any more successful than it has been previously.)

As for the ducks, Minna is - once again - laying eggs. This means several things: one, that Minna is regularly leaving eggs in the bunny room every morning; two, that Minna has become very insistent - and very vocal - in demanding multiple trips to the dog's water bowl every night; and three, that Maggie's hormones are in overdrive and she (he) frequently attacks both Minna and myself in multiple attempts to mate every day. It is particularly dangerous to refill the dog water bowl in the evening as that seems to have a sort of aphrodisiac effect on Maggie. I'm not entirely sure why that is - but it is almost a guarantee that as soon as I start pouring the water Maggie will either hop on top of Minna or go after my ankles.

Ah, and there it is, right on cue. Minna is demanding her third, or maybe fourth, trip out to the water bowl which means my peace and quiet has come to an end. She is, as I said, very vocal.

In the bleak midwinter...

Ah, December 30. Christmas is over and I managed to accomplish somewhere around 90% of the things on my list. I did not manage to get the kitchen trim or crown molding done, and the dogs still haven't had their baths and won't be getting them for a week or two yet as Kita just had surgery to remove six fatty tumors from his head and belly so he can't have a bath until the stitches are out in ten days or so. I managed to finish all my shopping at the last minute but I decided to do a somewhat simplified route for the gift wrap (read: the gifts were wrapped, but nowhere near the level of Martha Stewart's wrapping. And I am perfectly ok with that.)

And although I am glad to finally be done with all the shopping and wrapping for another year, I am sad to see Christmas go. Not so much because I miss the gifts or the food (we have a special breakfast menu that we only use once or twice a year) but because I miss the season. Up until December 25 there's this huge thing to look forward to: decorations are set out, lights are up on the houses, people are - for the most part - pleasant and giving, families spend time together and everything seems somehow brighter.

After Christmas you have until New Years, give or take a few days, and then all the decorations get put away, the lights pulled down and stored, and there is nothing to look forward to. Just three months of cold, grey, bleak weather. I can't even look forward to snow, at least not on a regular basis. Any snow that shows up here is, for the most part, a pleasant surprise and short lived. We had an unexpected snowfall yesterday but by this morning all that remained was slush on the sidewalks that makes it dangerous to walk three exuberant dogs.

So here we go, entering the hardest part of the year. And it will be especially dreary this year as I am headed back to school (for the zillionth time) and am signed up for the oh-so-exciting classes of Statistics and Intro to Accounting. I can hardly wait. School-wise, spring doesn't look much better: I have to take on campus classes of chemistry and microbiology, with labs. There are few things I hate more than lab classes. Sigh.

Speaking of things I've been dreading brings me to January 1st. The day that all my resolutions go into effect, including the one to weigh in at the beginning of every month. It will, in all likelihood, not be pleasant as I have been munching on the four basic food groups all this month: chocolate, ice cream, cake and chips. And I have been using my current cold as an excuse to avoid my workouts.

I just realized that I've been rambling on about just about everything except my animal family here on the Unfarm. So what can I tell you? Minna continues to wiggle out of her diaper most nights, leaving me a mess to clean up in the morning - but both ducks have at least been staying in their corner as opposed to fly-jumping onto the rabbit cages in the morning. (Knock on wood.) The chickens have seen snow before and weren't particularly pleased to see it again. The ducks had not seen it before but didn't seem to mind it much - it is, after all, just another form of water - especially today when it melted and left puddles everywhere. Kita was excited to see the snow but unfortunately wasn't up to playing in it much as he was still recuperating from his surgery. Buddy the Wimpet will take snow over rain, if forced to choose one, but would much rather deal with the heat, and Maia doesn't care what the weather does as long as she gets to sleep on the bed during the 23 hours and 45 minutes that she isn't outside every day. I attempted another bonding between TJ and Jojo yesterday. It failed - I'll allow you a minute or two to get over your shock. [Humming a little tune...] Mynx was sad to see her mom go home yesterday but she has decided that her routine here isn't so bad and Aspen has discovered that when we are out of his preferred milk he will gladly accept a squirt of whipped cream as a substitute. And that's the news on the Unfarm, for now.

[Partial] Christmas To Do List

Here it is, December 16 and I have a million things still to do. In an effort to get organized, I am writing up a list of at least some of the things I have to get done. So here it is. On the plus side, the weather has finally gotten into the 40-50 degree range, meaning that everything that was frozen has now thawed out and I can once again use the hose outside to do the animal chores, making things MUCH easier. For the (too many days) that the temperatures were below freezing, I was having to lug a bucket of water, soap and scrub brush out to the side of the yard to clean off the duck stuff every morning. And I didn't even try to clean out the rabbit boxes. We were having all the inconvenience of snow without any of the fun of it. Just cold and clear and not a snowflake in sight.

1. Finish three week drawing in less than two days

2. Get to IKEA for picture frames

3. Make fudge

4. Order Bootie Pop panties (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4EvVErNhVE) haha - as if!

5. Make rocky road candy

6. Make butter toffee candy

7. Make chocolate covered cherries

8. Bake rolled sugar cookies

9. Bake cranberry coconut cookies

10. Give away 90% of what I just made.

11. Finish Christmas newsletter

12. Take the train to Spokane

13. Alter Maggie's diapers (ugg - I wish they would just stay ON)

14. Make new diapers for Minna (see comment for number 13)

15. Deliver Scentsy orders

16. Give the dogs a bath - all three of them (dogs, that is, not baths)

17. Give Aspen a haircut (remembering to first recruit help and write my Will, and keep plenty of bandages nearby and an ambulance on stand-by)

18. Buy Christmas gift(s) for the cats

19. Ditto for the dogs, bunnies, ducks and chickens

20. Finish the kitchen baseboards

21. Buy, cut, and put up crown molding in the kitchen

22. Replace the old kitchen trim with the new stuff.

23. Vow to never again start a project that I think I can handle only to realize that I really actually handle it. Or can handle it but don't really want to handle it.

24. Buy Christmas gifts for Mom, Dad, Liz, Pete, and Jenny, and wrap them all in yards of gift wrap, ribbons, bows, and hand stamped and embossed gift tags, as per Martha Stewart's instructions.

25. Buy birthday gifts for Mom, Liz and Pete, and wrap them as indicated above.