Not our driveway, but Hidden Meadows Ln just past our driveway.

Drifting being the main thrust of this post. We are drifted in. Not exactly "snowed in" because with the amount of snow that we got on Friday is not enough to keep us in. No, it's the darned wind that kicked up and lifted all that fresh snow up and rearranged it wherever it felt like it. We have too much snow to plow it and our snowblower won't start. Sheesh. We can take the Ranger out to the top of our neighbor's hill where we have parked the Suburban, but the roads past that point are too drifted right now as well, or at least we are assuming so. Our neighbors are blaming this unseasonably harsh weather on us, telling us we brought it from New Jersey with us. I have always told them that because we moved here expect this winter to be worse than normal. Now it's come true with frigid temperatures and wind that would normally be seen in March. Like my neighbor said, what can March bring now?

Drifting along too in another sense, I've been sick for a week now and getting really tired of it. Some sort of flu-like bug that I am having a hard time shaking. Normally I would be loving this shut-in-wintry-world outside my window. I have tons of knitting that I am longing to get to and finish, books to read, games to play on the iPad, but all I seem to manage to be able to do is sleep and watch TV. My head is too muddy and swimmy to concentrate on any of those projects. So, I feel as if I am just drifting along from day to day. 

One good thing about watching a lot of TV, we are slowly but surely making our way through the Downton Abbey Marathon that we recorded over the Thanksgiving holidays when PBS was airing it. We've seen it before minus the last season, but we are enjoying it all the more the second time around. I am so immersed in it that I am beginning to feel like part of the family. Honestly, one of the best series ever produced. The costuming! The characters! I will be sad to finally finish all seasons. Masterpiece Theater never fails us. We also recently watched The Durrells in Corfu (also a Masterpiece production) which was equally delightful and one we didn't want to see end.

We have these sweet Gray-Crowned Rosy Finches at our house now. About 100 of them! I love how finches always arrive in flocks. The cold weather doesn't seem to bother them too much.

Our Steller Jays, on the other hand, seem to be a put out with the cold temperatures. Doesn't he look cold and disgusted?

We haven't been outside much latey, mostly because of the windchill, but yesterday I was feeling good enough to take the dogs to the top of the driveway and see what was happing outside the cabin wall. Mother Nature has been very busy sculpting and moving snow around. It's kind of strange how some surfaces are scoured clear of snow while other have a couple of feet in drifts.

Here is Destin enjoying the drifts along our little lane which is rapidly filling in.

Trees make great snow fences. If only they would grow in the appropriate places.

It's still very windy today but at least it's supposed to above freezing, so maybe in a day or two we will be able to make it to the mailboxes and possibly even into town!

Destin is jumping for joy at the prospect of going for a ride!

I love a fresh, hot biscuit slathered with butter and topped with jam for breakfast. But, making fresh biscuits has always been a struggle for me. Even after all the work of cutting in butter, gently working the dough, cutting out the biscuits and baking them, they'd tend to be flat and not as flaky as I like. Then, Lynne pointed me to a recipe for 5-Ingredient Freezer Biscuits and life changed!

Biscuit and (local) jam breakfast!

You can find the recipe in our recipe database or the original on the budgetbytes.com site.

The beauty of this recipe is its use of heavy cream for the fat component, as well as the ease of preparation. I made a batch the other afternoon. I didn't even have to put them in the freezer. Instead I put the freshly cut biscuits on a sheet pan, covered them with plastic wrap, and put them on the front porch. They were frozen solid in a couple of hours.

Now, they are in a zip bag in the freezer and all we have to do to have fresh biscuits is take a few out of the freezer and place them on a sheet pan. Preheat the oven. Pop them into the oven for about 20 minutes. And, we have nice, hot, flaky biscuits for breakfast!

Frozen biscuits, right out of the freezer, on a sheet pan waiting for the oven to preheat.

Nice, hot, flaky biscuits right out of the oven.

We had some pretty high winds on Thursday and Thursday night. Sometime overnight two large (dead) trees fell in the meadow. These are trees that were killed by beetles several years ago. Eventually, all the dead trees will fall.

The bad news is that each time a tree falls, we lose some of the buffer we have against the prevailing west winds. The good news is we get a cord or two of fire wood for the next year.

Here is a closer view:

You can see that the larger tree just fell over with its root ball intact and has two trunks.

The smaller tree got caught in another tree and ended up in a strange position.

A closer view of that.

It had snowed and blown enough that we had to use snowshoes to take the short hike through the meadow. Destin was oblivious to anything other than playing in the snow.

We decided to wash the bed sheets yesterday. We rotate through a couple of sets, and needed some clean sheets. In summer, we just hang our laundry on the outside line to dry. But, when it is 21° outside and snowing, we use some wooden drying racks that we place in front of the wood stove. We have a fan on the stove that is powered by the heat of the stove and it provides just enough air circulation to make quick work of drying any clothes hung on the rack.

You can see the blur of the fan in this photo.

Smaller items can be laid across the many wooden bars on the racks. For the sheets, we just drape them across.

We did two loads: the sheets and the duvet cover. 

It was great sleeping in clean sheets last night! The dogs and cat really enjoyed it too.

Well, as I had suspected it makes little sense to try to keep Wapiti Way clear with the new plow. The road runs N-S along some open sagebrush prairie and any wind from the southwest or west will fill it with snow. The other day, I plowed it and it looked like this:

This morning, we needed to get into town for a vet appointment, it it looked more like this:

Actually, this photo is taken after attempting to get up the hill with the Expedition. We got stuck right away. The snow on the road was about 12" to 14" deep. It didn't look that deep, but it was. The problem driving through it is not so much the tires not grabbing, but rather the undercarriage of the truck getting "high centered" on the snow. I was able to back us out of the drift. I walked back to the cabin to get the Ranger and try to plow enough snow from the road to get over it. There was too much snow to get in one go with the plow, so I set it midway so I'd cut 5" to 6" off the top. My plan was to make another pass to get it down to the ground. However, I failed to tell Lynne my plan and she decided to drive the truck up after me, following my tracks. The problem is, the Ranger with tracks on it rides pretty much on top of the snow. So, after a few feet of following me, the truck was stuck again. And, this time I could not back it out. 

I got the shovel (we always throw a shovel in the truck when we go out) and began clearing the snow from around the tires while Lynne took off walking to the top of the hill where our neighbors were waiting for us in their truck. We had agreed to follow each other into town knowing the buddy system is safer.

Our neighbor, David, drove his truck over the sagebrush hill to get on the road behind the Expedition. We then used a tow rope to pull the Expedition clear of the snow drift. 

Lesson learned: don't even try to drive on the road. Instead, go cross country on the hill (we own that property). This works for a couple of reasons. First, there is simply less snow there after a big blow. Second, the gravel hill and sagebrush gives us more traction. 

So, rather than try to keep Wapiti Way "open" by plowing it, we'll just drive cross country to the top of the hill. I think I'll ask if we can park the Suburban there because once we are at the top of the hill, we have the same trek as our neighbors and we can work together to get into town and back. We will always try to coordinate trips so neither of us tries to go it alone.

The good news is that our Christmas cards are mailed. Hailey kept her vet appointment and we have meds for everyone for at least 2 months. We bought our Christmas ham and some wine. So, we are ready to sit here through Christmas if necessary. That does mean we may not get our mail.