Happy New Year 2015

Sunday, Dec 28

CPAP report. Reported figures. 7 hrs 24 min with AHI = 0.41

Not much happened today. John took care of animals and fed us, plus he brushed and cut wood enough to claim having worked in the woods. The 2014 greetings newsletter and some music related action – that preparation for Wednesday – interrupted my day of not doing much.

Monday, Dec 29

CPAP report. Reported figures. 8 hrs 44 min with AHI = 0.46

I sent some emails to the music group about the events this week, and the cancellation of our play date at Royal Vista on New Year’s Day. They are on “lock-down” and quarantining residents in their rooms because of a bad respiratory ailment some have, hoping it doesn’t spread throughout the facility.
I worked more on my music for January & February to use with our traveling music group to assisted living homes and other venues. I added Blue Skirt Waltz, Bouquet of Roses, and The Quilting Party into my SongWriter software.
I have been working on a lot of projects today and John made 3 loaves of bread. Bless his heart. I’ve had 3 pieces. One while warm (and buttered), and two unbuttered, with beef/pork/chicken stew.
One unusual one is a round loaf baked in a Pyrex bowl. Pretty cool. Before we cut into it Saturday morning, I took this photo, using the large coffee mug for scale — otherwise it looks like a big hamburger roll {click image}:
RoundBread

I finished the draft of our 2014 newsletter season’s greetings, and John is currently proofing it. Well, we got it finished, but when I viewed it on line the end of the presentation for December is duplicated, and I haven’t been able to change the code to remove it. If I cannot rebuild it, I will just send with the ending glitch.
I have worked off and on – dishes, music, computer, and walked up the driveway for the mail. It was COLD, but above freezing. Didn’t go to single digits as predicted. We had a little dusting of snow this morning, and the sun shone all day.

Tuesday, Dec 30

CPAP report. Reported figures. 2 hrs 16 min with AHI = 0.00

Not a good night’s CPAP session for time. Got to bed very late, almost 1:00 a.m. and the mask was seriously leaking. I awoke at 3:17 and thought it was much later -– guess I read the clock wrong, should’ve looked at my watch, but instead I turned off my machine, removing the mask. Went back to sleep without it for 5.5 hrs.
Terrible day today with my web page creating software called SeaMonkey not obeying my wishes. John doesn’t think seamonkies exist and suggests I look for something else. I guess my friend uses Bluefish and those do exist, so perhaps I’ll consider it.
I need to finish some of the music for noon tomorrow at the food bank, which is a pre-cursor to the notebooks for January/February.
I did hear about a neat story of a bear cub in Cle Elum, WA, about 20 miles west of us. This little guy below, named Snowy, orphaned, appeared at the USFS headquarters. He’d been hanging around for several days. They tranquilized him and took him to a rehab facility in Idaho.
BearCubCleElum

Wednesday, Dec 31 New Year’s Eve

CPAP report. Reported figures. 8 hrs 21 min with AHI = 0.24

I finished up music for our Jan / Feb repertoire and took it to the food bank to play today. We had nice end of year treats and a small but appreciative crowd. They served chicken-filled soup, rice with Mexican type topping, green salad, and lemon cake for dessert. As we were leaving the parking lot, we passed the bread “room” container and were encouraged to take away anything we wanted, because they would not be open until next Monday. The bread will not spoil because it will be as if it is in a freezer, but I accepted the offer anyway. I found a couple of loaves of Rosemary Olive bread and some Croissant rolls, and some large hamburger ones. Neat stop at Rite Aid with a coupon for packages of Pepsi and Diet Pepsi at a very reduced price (25¢/can) and got some other stuff marked down.

On my way home, I made several stops for meds, for a gift for someone else, for cat and dog food, and more stuff for tonight. Came home and finished putting together music for the party. John had cooked 2 meats for the dinner: pork roast with cherry sauce and chicken thighs baked with pineapple and Italian spices. We had 17 people there, and lots of good food. We usually take something substantial, usually roasted fresh pork or chicken, ’cause we never host these things. The folks where we go prefer to have the crowd and, thus, they don’t have to travel. We are just 5 miles away and so can take a roast out of our oven and have it on their counter in less time than cooks suggest letting it “rest” before carving.

Thursday, Jan 1 Happy New Year

CPAP report. Reported figures. 7 hrs 45 min with AHI = 0.00

From Jeri and Kurt Conklin’s traveling adventures, we received this photo of Daisy at the Sahuaro Brittany Club field trial ahead of the Western Futurity in Sonoita, AZ.
Daisy_Jan1_SonoitaAZ
Continued working on 2014 greetings problem.

Friday, Jan 2

CPAP report. Reported figures. 6 hrs 36 min with AHI = 0.00

My battery must have run out on the oximeter because it only recorded for 3 hrs.
I worked a lot on the web page greetings — pulling in more photos. I will stop until Monday when I hear back from our web space provider if there is a time out on the upload that I’m not reaching, and therefore am sending an incomplete file. We made a Cashew/Lemon cake-like thing for tomorrow; not with a soft filling like most lemon bars. When it was out of the oven and up and cooling, we went to bed.

Saturday, Jan 3

CPAP report. Reported figures. 8 hrs 10 min with AHI = 0.37

We ate sparingly this AM, took care of the horses, and turned the heating thing down a couple of degrees. About 10:30 we closed the front gate and drove the 1 hr-20 minutes over to White Heron & the Mariposa Vineyard. It’s 64.2 miles by road but only about 30 miles as the crow flies. The day was overcast and stayed around 27°. A few miles down the road and close to cell phone towers, I called John’s sister in Parma, OH. Peggy said it was raining hard and a neighbor was taking her garbage container from the curb to her garage, so she didn’t have to get wet. His short interruption and one dropped signal (basalt cliffs do that) were hardly noticed during the conversation for the whole trip. We stopped talking when we got within sight of the vineyard.
So, here is the story from there:
John, Nancy, and Cameron Fries, the owner of the vineyard and winery, are pictured below – John had food in his mouth and we were trying to make him laugh; I was not yet looking at the camera, but the one where I was, was not as good as this one.
JohnNancyCameron-at-Raclette
We got to the vineyard and John and others unloaded the firewood he had packed. We came home smelling like smoke. The bonfire is the center of the day, because it is to produce coals, for melting the large piece of cheese. This year the cheese was square-shaped. For previous years it has been circular.
ScrapingCheese
It was another wonderful Raclette with the pruners and their family (wives or sister). The food and fellowship was really fine and provided a lot of fun and laughter. One of the pruners (Tom) brought a birthday cake (carrot with pecans grown by this sister – he grows walnuts and they trade), and he also brought us two boxes of Honeycrisp apples from controlled-atmosphere (CA) storage at Double Diamond Packers in Quincy, WA. They are huge apples, but probably not as large as some we have had in the past. Each box has 12. The boxes sell for $10. These weigh almost a pound each (two checked at 14 ounces, so we likely have 10.5# in each box. The place is not open on Saturdays, and Tom was kind enough to offer to go by and get them for us. I took the following picture on Sunday morning.
HoneyCrispApples
We were down the road from Quincy at Trinidad, and you can hear part of the story for the naming of the “town” in the following You Tube capture I made at the Raclette.

Great Northern names TRINIDAD

The amount and variety of food is always amazing and enjoyable. I will try to recall all we had. We had some tiny purple potatoes I believe are Purple Majesty, smaller than a golf ball, with dark purple skin and vibrant royal purple insides. They are native to the Lake Titicaca region of high plains and mountain slopes of Peru and Bolivia. They have been cultivated for 8000 years. We also had some small yellow ones called Yellow Finns. That is a cultivar sourced to Europe. We had sausage (turkey/apple), steamed over new red wine. Short cuttings lined the bottom of a cast iron pot to keep the sausage up out of the liquid. That pot and others with potatoes were placed on rocks by the fire. Some people roasted theirs over the open fire after the steaming. I wish I had, but I was busy filming the filling of plates for a few folks. John just cut his open and scraped hot cheese on to it. We had deviled eggs with two different garnishes, Carpathian walnuts with sesame seeds and roasted in olive oil, a bowl of olives with orange rind and garlic, another dish of garlic stuff to spread on two types of Spelt flour homemade bread (by Tom) that was excellent. A dish of cranberry mixture also was on that table. Another table had little pickled onions, pickles, pickled asparagus, an awesome Waldorf salad, and a bean salad; later the desserts were added to that table, with hot coffee/tea brought out too. Desserts included two kinds of lemon bars and a carrot cake.
Tom made an extra carrot cake with a candle to present to John a day early. {click for larger image}
HappyBirthDay
Watch the presentation: Happy Birthday, John 2015

We will officially celebrate John’s b.d. tomorrow with the cake, apples, and a couple of the lemon bars of ours we brought back that were not eaten or taken home with folks. I now wish I had brought home one of the other lemon bars, as I really liked them.

While we were racletting, I received 2 phone calls from Jeri Conklin who is in the Southwestern desert near Sonoita, AZ. She is there for the Western Futurity with all her dogs (including our co-owned female Brittany, Cedaridge Kip’s Camelot Shay Tre’ JH (Daisy). Today was the preceding Sahuaro Brittany Club field trial. In Jeri’s words on Facebook, “Daisy laid down one helluva run to include a pond swim! Two nice finds too!” That made me smile to realize her great great great grandma, DC/AFC/CC Sirius Sashay was written up in the ABC (American Brittany Club) magazine about running in the Nationals and swimming across a lake when called back on course from afar. (From Jeri’s phone message, she said she had a classy point on her first bird, and held). We hear results Sunday afternoon.

Sunday, Jan 4 HAPPY BIRTHDAY, John

Heard from the field in Arizona, John’s birthday present was Daisy getting a 4th placement in the Open Derby, with 22 dogs running. That was a nice thing to happen before the futurity show starts tomorrow and the field portion starts on Tuesday. This picture came in from Jeri on Facebook in time to make it to this blog today, on the day of the award.
Daisy4thPlaceDerby
Hope your week was fine.

Nancy and John
Still on the Naneum Fan
(with an inch of snow today)