Sorry. I couldn’t come up with a better title! The new blog site is coming along albeit slowly. It’s harder to work on it with Rick and I trading chats throughout the day while he’s at work about the formatting, font style, etc. I can only hope that when we’re through I like it and most people reading like it as well. Hopefully the new look will be revealed next week. At least that is what we are aiming for. I don’t want to drag this out too long!

The little common redpolls have moved on as predicted. I still see one or two on the finch sock, but it’s been taken over by goldfinches and I’ve even seen a few sparrows on it pecking away. I am wishing now I had participated in Project Feeder Watch run by Cornell. I would have except for the fact that right now our main bird feeder hangs in such a way that I can’t actually see the birds when they are on it. Our hanger makes it too low and it’s hard to remedy that easily since the hanger attaches to the deck railing. I figured I couldn’t get a good enough bird count without actually seeing them on the feeder. I would love to do this, so maybe I should be thinking ahead for next year and plan out a feeder strategy.

Our weather is warming up and our frozen snowpack is slowly melting. Fifty degrees is the predicted temperature for this upcoming weekend! It’s not my preference as I like winter to be winter. Plus, I really like looking out the window and seeing the ground covered in white instead of all those brown fallen leaves. It makes it so easy to see things in the woods, like the deer roaming around. But, it seems there is always a January warm-up each year around the same time. Even in Colorado this was true.

But I’m a Winter Girl. Born in winter; raised in winter. See?

There is supposedly an arctic blast coming next week. Not sure if there is any moisture around for snow though.

We’ve been having issues for a couple of months now with itchy and scratchy dogs. Alex developed big oozing hot spots from chewing and Bella woke us up from sound sleeps scratching. We had multiple vet visits. First one said flea allergies but we had not seen any fleas on anyone. So, they put them on a steroidal allergy medication which seemed to do not much. Back again and they said well, they probably have a skin infection now since the skin was breached, so antibiotics. Again, not much happened to relieve the itchy and scratchy show.

I could never seem to get in to the vet I like best at the clinic because I wanted an appointment pronto and he is harder to get in to see. I wanted the vets to see the areas of concern on the dogs while they were looking fresh. The first vet had said well, it could be scabies but I doubt it since she said we would be scratching and presenting with a rash too.

Long story short: the dogs have now been diagnosed with canine scabies, more commonly known as mange. Ewwww. Mangy dogs! Mange is caused by mites that get underneath the skin. On our last visit to the vet (and the vet I wanted) he took a scraping from Alex’s skin and found a mite under the microscope. Hurrah! Finally. Why didn’t the other vets take a scraping??

The vet said mange is more common than you’d think since we live around so much wildlife here. He said they could have picked it up in the driveway or the yard. I suspect these two “mangy” foxes that come around. Ugly, eh? We also have some suspicious looking squirrels who are always scratching. Or it could have been at the last groomer’s since it started right after their last grooming.

It’s easy enough to treat with a product called Revolution which is like Frontline except that it treats different things (like mites and heart worm). Revolution is right. Let’s lead a revolt against those terrible mites! Be gone! After only one application the dogs are already showing improvement. Hallelujah!

So, that about catches you up on what’s been going around here. I hope to get away from the usual household routine today and spend a little time at Skylands. We’ll see if that works out.

On New Year’s Day we took the dogs for a “big” walk, meaning we walked down our street, and crossed the main road and entered the woods by Green Turtle Pond. You know: The Thorn Queen’s Kingdom.

By the looks of the entrance you would think she was once again plotting a new way to keep people (me) out since her thorns are lessened by the snowpack. These trees no doubt blew over right across the trail during Hurricane Sandy. It did not deter us!

Her kingdom looks very different from the last time I took you here.

I liked this woodpecker-holed tree. Did the bird drill from both sides to achieve the see-through hole?

The dogs love the freedom of running off-lead and exploring. They get lots of exercise since they run down the trail, then run back to get a treat from us. (Which is the way we trained them to stay close to us at the cabin.)

Bella

Here is Alex coming back for a treat and Hailey in the background not wanting to be left out where any kind of food is involved. Here I come, wait for me!!

Lunch involved our favorite champagne (Veuve Clicquot) with a toast to the New Year.

(Don’t look at the photo too hard for anything much in focus because I think it’s somewhere in the bubbles! I know, I know, but somehow it worked for me.)

And, we tried out a new recipe from a new cookbook Fireside Feasts & Snow Day Treats: Parmesan Custards with Anchovy Toasts.

The cookbook is British but has both UK and US measurements and usage of words which helps. I know most people don’t like anchovies, but here they get mashed with butter, spread on the bread and then panini-ed. The salt of the anchovy matched really well with the custards. You have to admit that at least they look good, yes? The custards didn’t come out quite as expected by following the directions, so if I make them again I’ll adjust the recipe. Still, they were really good. You can always go really light on the anchovies or leave them out altogether I suppose, which would probably be most people’s choice!

The cookbook has lots of tasty looking recipes and only one vegetable that I don’t know what it is since they only used the British word for it: a swede. I am assuming I am not supposed to slice up a person from Sweden! (Take one Swede and cut in half … ) Maybe a rutabaga since it’s a root vegetable gratin?? Anyway, that’s my best guess.

Now that I’ve turned you off our cooking completely I’ll get on with my day!

Mom! Let us in!

Yesterday was a snow day around our house. It started snowing around 10:30 and didn’t stop until after the sun went down. I would have thought we’d have more than we do since at times it was really coming down hard, but we ended up with about 4.5 inches out of a prediction of 3-6 inches.

I love to capture the birds at our feeder while it’s snowing so I tempted them with some extra seed sprinkled on the deck railings and on top of the old dry sink where we grow our kitchen herbs.

Tufted titmouse.

A tuxedo wearing junco.

Mr. & Mrs. C.

Mr. Purple Finch sporting the newest in bird fashion: snowflake nose!

A dry sink icicle.

We stayed around the wood stove in the sun room and finished our jigsaw puzzle (I’m ready to start another one!). We split some firewood and restocked our diminished supply in the basement so we don’t have to constantly go outside to get wood. We cooked.

The bubbles of olive oil as we started the polenta caught my eye.

Our Osso Bucco. Yum!

The railing on our front steps with its fresh coating of snow. No flash: just turned up my ISO speed.

Now this morning we have the chore of clearing the deck, driveway and front steps of all that lovely new snow! At least it was just snow this time and no freezing rain or “wintry mix.”

Alex waiting patiently Christmas morning to open packages.

We had a good Christmas. How about you?

It snowed about an inch on Christmas Eve. It was so pretty coming down. We turned on the outside light around 8:00 p.m. and just sat in the sun room with a cup of homemade egg nog (yes, I used raw eggs) and watched it snow. Perfection! When we got up Christmas morning and opened the curtains to that covering of white it was picture perfect. The snow mostly melted during the day when it warmed up to the high 30’s.

We had a small Christmas (meaning not many gifts) but the gifts we did get and receive were not as small. I thought it was pretty funny that both Rick and I gave each other a kind of camera! I gave him a time-lapse camera because he spends his days around cameras that do the opposite (high-speed slow motion) and I thought he needed to slow down a bit.

He gave me a Lytro camera, which I had never heard of before. It’s just a tiny little thing that can be easily popped into a pocket and taken along. It takes “living” pictures. I’ll be featuring them in my blog from now on in combination with normal photos. For the Lytro pics you can click on various spots of the photo and it will come in to focus as other parts go out of focus. I have added a perspective feature to most of them which makes the photo look 3D (depending on how deep my depth of field was in that particular photo) and you can click and drag to explore the photo a bit more. Try it with this photo I took of Hailey in the foreground and Bella in the distance.

See how her head pops out of the photo? Cool, eh?

So, how does the magic happen? I’m not too up on the technical bits but here is a brief explanation from Rick.
“Called a “light field” camera or “plenoptic camera”. A digital camera that acquires images in a whole new way, then uses complex computations to render the photos. Each pixel you see in the photo is actually imaged by many different pixels with different focal distances. All this data is later used to computationally render the photo.” Hmm … clear as mud, right? All you really need to focus on (Hah, pun, get it?) it that it takes cool photos.

Here are a couple more.

We spent the day playing with our new toys, taking the dogs for a walk and cooking our Christmas meal of Duck in orange sauce, two-potato gratin and roasted brussels sprouts with homemade profiteroles for dessert.

Yesterday we ventured out of the house and into town for a few things, then took the dogs down the road to Green Turtle Pond for an off-leash run. Brrr it was cold—below freezing! Just like littlel kids, the dogs had to step on every frozen puddle and break the ice. It was a game to them.

Then yesterday afternoon it snowed again, as predicted, while we watched the movie “Inception.” I may never think the same way about my dreams again! We got about four to four and a half inches of nice snow before it turned to freezing rain, then rain. I took these two shots just as it was turning to freezing rain. The trees were coated in what looked like white cotton candy and looked very strange. I hope you appreciate these photos because I went out in my slippers and bathrobe to take them! You can see my footprints in the snow on the steps for depth.

They say we are getting more snow on Saturday. I guess winter has arrived in New Jersey!

At 3:18 this morning I woke up to a strange noise. I couldn’t figure it out at first. Was it the wind kicking back up? As the sound grew closer I realized what I was hearing. The snow plow. The scraping of the blade on the road combined with the clank of the chained-up tires was a sound I was not familiar with. Yet.

The Nasty Nor’easter was nice enough to pass by further out in the ocean so that we were not greatly impacted. We got about four inches of sticky, heavy wet snow and some wind, but the wind was not terrible. The worst part of the storm was, of course, during Rick’s commute home. It took him 1.45 hours. Many roads are still closed from Sandy, and if they are open some don’t have power and the traffic lights are not working. Loads of fun!

The lights flickered on and off a couple of times and I thought oh no, here we go, but we did not lose power. whew. So many people are still without power. My mailman, Dennis, is still without power but he has a generator. The Fed-Ex guy (who is sweet enough to always put our wine delivery inside the house for me) is still out of power down by Wayne and is living with his parents for the duration. So. Many. People. I’m not sure how we got lucky enough to get our restored so quickly. I am thankful for that every day.

I hate to waste the gas so I haven’t really been anywhere in a week except for just locally to the grocery, the library (which at the time could not check in or out books while their system was down) and the feed store. I really need to go down to Wayne but I think I will give it until Monday before I venture out into the great unknown since Rick is still having difficulties getting to and from work. When I do finally go down I will make it as efficient a trip as I possibly can given the gas situation.

And that’s about all I have for you today!

Bella enjoying the snow.