We got a set of snowshoes for Eric and Sunday we finally had the necessary combination of enough snow and free time to take them out.

Sometimes the brush tripped him up but for the 1st time on snowshoes he did really well.

We stopped off and checked out the fort/hut that Eric and I built in the fall.

In December Eric and I made 18 fire starters. While these fire starters are a little heavy for backpacking they work fine for canoe camping or casual camp fires. I had some left over paraffin so I used the rest of the paraffin. The ingredients: paraffin and shavings or sawdust. My shavings are mixed with a little bit of sawdust.

Pack the shavings into a muffin tin. You can do this with or without muffin wrappers. If you want to re-use the muffin tins, use wrappers. This is a good task to do while the paraffin is melting. Warm the paraffin up slowly – you are just trying to get it to melt, not boil. It is best to avoid a future domestic scene and use an old pot as getting all the residual paraffin out can be problematic.

Finally the last of the paraffin is melted and can be poured into the muffin tins. If the pot is very full dip the paraffin out using a disposable cup so you don’t end up with wax being poured everywhere. You can vary the size of the fire starter by controlling the amount of wax poured into the muffin tin.

After the wax has cooled and congealed you can pop them out of the muffin tin and store them for future use.

What does your desktop look like?  My looks like this…..

My desktop picture was taken this summer on western end of Lows Lake early in the morning as we sought the portage trail to the Oswegatchie River.

Friday Matt, Mark, Skip, Bob & I went over to the hunting camp on the West Sacandaga River where Skip holds a membership. View East from the porch:

We got to the camp around 10am and started a fire in the wood stove. We sat around and talked for a while and fed the fire until it was going nicely. We strapped on our snow shoes and went for a short walk along the West Sacandaga. Group shot:

It was a nice mixed woods and on our return we saw a flying squirrel. Mark and Bob each saw it fly/glide and all except Matt saw it sitting in a small beech tree.

Skip and Bob returning to camp:

In the afternoon and evening we played pitch and ate chicken stew. The wood stove kept the camp very toasty. We turned in at 9pm and slept until 7am. It rained overnight and the heat of the wood stove combined with the warming temperatures caused some snow slides off the metal roof.

Saturday I got home a little before noon, showered and put away my gear. It was Kathryn’s birthday and we went to a movie – Charlie Wilson’s War with Tom Hanks- out to a nice meal and were home by 9pm.

What are the essentials for a 4 year old snow hiker?

1. Your walking stick/weapon/sword/whacker. Used on real and pretend monsters. Dead branches everywhere tremble in fear.

2. Waterproof boots, because if there is water it will be walked in.

3. A hood covering a black balaclava. The balaclava makes one look like a ninja – very important to a 4 year old.

4. Mittens and warm clothes, because the walk only lasts as long as one is warm.

This morning, after our oatmeal breakfast, we decided the dogs and kid would benefit from a walk outside.  It was windy and cold, 18 degrees with a 12 mph wind yielding a wind chill of about 7 degrees.  We counted on getting in the woods and out of the wind, but with the wind coming in from the southeast we were pretty exposed during our short walk.  How cold was it?  We could watch the ice crystals forming on running water – that’s cold.

We compost. During the summer this mean putting left over vegetables, egg shells, fruit, etc. in a large compost box. We aren’t too good at doing all procedures you are supposed to do to create healthy compost; watering, turning it over, etc. But our system used to work pretty good as the compost box was located next to a hedge and sat on a section of usually damp ground. Stuff rotted and the garter snakes loved it – nesting in the compost and sitting in it’s heat.

Two years ago we pulled out the white cedar hedge, rolled up the barbwire fence and got a professional fence company to install block wire and board fence around the roughly two acre lot that the house sits on. One causality was the site for the compost box – it got moved. The new site is drier and the compost doesn’t rot as well – the snakes have abandoned us. So at the end of the fall I was forced to make a decision about the un-rotted compost. Either dump it as is out in the pasture, leave it until next year or figure out a way to compost it.

The answer: red wiggler worms. I transferred all the compost into a 55 gal plastic barrel, soaked it, moved the barrel into the basement and bought 1lb of red wiggler worms. 1lb was probably not enough worms for the amount of compost we had accumulated, but I wanted to make sure everyone had enough to eat until spring, when they could be released. Plus red wigglers are prolific breeders, laying one egg capsule nearly every seven days. Each worm capsule will hatch an average of 3 to 4 earthworms. The hatched earthworms will grow to adults in about three months.

Here the red wigglers are being deployed before being covered up with old damp towels. So far the red wigglers have reduced the barrel volume from 3/4 full to roughly 1/2 full even though we have continued to contribute our vegetable & fruit scraps.

We have had some cold mornings so far. The ponds have frozen over, thawed and re-frozen. We have had snow but it melted during the day. This morning felt different. For one thing the town snowplows were out during the night – plowing and sanding. It was cold this morning and we got 1-2 inches of snow that hung around all day.

A telling first sign of winter is a driver off the road. As I walked to my car to leave for work a red pickup truck went by 55+mph – fast enough to make me think “That driver is going too fast”. Sure enough about 1.5 miles west the red pickup was parked on it’s nose in a deep ditch with the driver talking on a cell phone.  Welcome to winter!

Lately we have some favorite media we are hitting on:

TV: Eric’s latest fave is Discovery Channel’s Dirty Jobs. It has been on for awhile, but he recently discovered it and watches it over any Noggin cartoons. There is an element of slapstick humor as Mike Rowe gets bitten by snakes, falls in mud, plays with bugs and gets dirty. I try to find the education element value in the show. Hey – it beats Wow, Wow, Wubzy.

Blogs: Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. I noticed this about a week ago on some list of fast rising blogs. Ree lives in the midwest, takes great pictures, posts about her family, living on a cow/calf ranch, cooking and photoshop.

Book: Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. This was loaned to me by a co-worker when I was going to be out of action for awhile. I am still only 2/3rds through the 750+ page book but it is a good read and I recommend it. It doesn’t just focus on Lincoln, but provides insights into contemporaries Edwin Stanton, Salmon Chase, William Seward and Edward Bates.

When I left for work on Wednesday Eric and Kathryn were cooking up a storm. Eric was tearing up bread for stuffing and Kathryn was dicing celery and onions for same. Below Eric shows the perfect size bread chunks for stuffing.

Later that day Kathryn made pies: French Apple, Cranberry, Peach and Pumpkin Roll.

We had 15 for Thanksgiving Day dinner; Billie Jo & Dakota, Ed, Kelly, Phoenix and Izzabella, Barb & Joe, Christian, Beth, C.T. and Nathan. Due to work and return schedules it was our earliest Thanksgiving Day ever. People came between 10 and 10:30 and we ate at noon. Just before dinner we posed for a family picture.

Left to right: Izzabella, Ed, Phoenix, Kelly, Jim, Eric, Kathryn, Dakota and Billie Jo.