On the way up.

Destin has been known for his death-defying feats since he was just a wee pup. He loves the challenge of climbing UP. Our big drift is developing on Avalanche Slope and Destin couldn't leave it alone. What follows is a photographic journey of what goes up, must come down.

Look Mom & Dad, I made it to the top!

King of the Drift!

Gosh, it's kind of steep here ...

Okay, here I go ... time to come down!

Just a few little trees, nothing I can't handle.

See? Easy-Peasy!

Gosh, that was fun, even if I did give Mom & Dad heart failure. 

Given the number of evergreen trees that have been killed by beetles over the past 10 years, we always find it very difficult to cut down a living evergreen tree. But, it is a Christmas tradition (for those Christmases we've spent here), to cut a tree on our property and decorate it in the cabin. We seek out a tree that is somehow "disadvantaged". It might be up against another tree so it only has one full side. Or, it might be growing in a cluster of trees and not getting adequate light.

Lynne standing by our freshly cut tree that we are about to haul up the hill to the cabin.

So, about 10 days ago we drove the Ranger down to the bottom of our valley along Avalanche Hill and ventured off into what we call the "Deep, Dark Woods" to find a tree. And, after 30 minutes or so, Lynne spotted the perfect candidate. I lugged the chain saw through 18" of snow to cut it, and we pulled it back out to the Ranger. We drove up the road to the top of the hill, and to the cabin.

We cut about 4 feet off the bottom, giving us a nice 8 foot tree. Lynne used the cut off part for boughs on the mantle of the fireplace. The tree is a perfect shape and size to fit the small place we have for it.

Hailey say's "Merry Christmas, Everyone!".

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.