Starting this week with Saturday, picking up from going to a Celtic music performance while John was sending a report to the blog last week. I told you then it was planned, but I was writing it on Friday night. I went with a couple from my music group to the Teanaway Grange to hear Prairie Spring’s concert. This was my first time to hear the three of them play their own stuff. As individuals, they are sometimes members of our fiddlers and friends group. As a trio they perform Celtic music and it is superb. One woman is on the fiddle, another is on the Auto Harp and Drum, and there is a fellow on the guitar. They do instrumentals and some vocals. There was one song where they had audience participation on the chorus. The audience was incredible too. They were stomping the floor and clapping and giving vocal appreciation calls. (Those have a name but I missed what it was called). I took a Costco Fruit Cake all cut up in pieces to the potluck. It was well received. Later we found a fruit cake in our local grocery store, for 7.98/pound. The Costco one was only 3.72/pound. The quality of what we got was excellent. It was so full of fruit and nuts it was difficult to cut. It was not mostly cake and in fact we couldn’t find any cake even though the ingredients mentioned flour! Next time we are at Costco we will be buying more and freezing them to use throughout the year. They do freeze well, but you have to age them 4 weeks before storing them. We found information on the web.
Sunday, John and I worked in the morning on chores, his being all outside in the cold. He has put a tarp over the top of our old Motor Home, because last year it leaked from a vent on the roof. After lunch we went to our friends southeast of town to get a couple of hearts from their beef that was butchered in the morning. John wants to dissect them and see what they look like (after hearing and learning all about the valves in my heart over the past year and a half). They have some extra “ tenderloin” their butcher called it, and he said it wouldn’t age well in the hanging process for aging, and that he would just toss it. John determined from a web search that it is really called hanger steak. Here is what Wikipedia describes it as: “ A hanger steak is a cut of beef steak prized for its flavor. Derived from the diaphragm of a steer, it typically weighs about 1 to 1.5 lbs (450 to 675g). In the past it was sometimes known as “butcher’s steak” because butchers would often keep it for themselves rather than offer it for sale.” John is cooking it for our dinner on Tuesday of this week. Check below for our assessment.
The taize’ service Sunday night was different from previous times. We had a snow storm, and the students cancelled their coming. We only had two violins for the music. The minister was not there because she went to the Philippines to be with her family for Thanksgiving. One of our former musicians will lead the communion and another will read the scriptures. Few people came to the service from the community. It was, however, a nice one. And, the supper was thick potato & leek soup – with the consistency of mashed potatoes. There was Vanilla Diet Pepsi to drink, and many desserts left over from a previous service in the day. Good tea cakes (which I always called shorties). Mostly just butter and sugar and nuts, rolled in powdered sugar. I drove home in a raging snow storm at 20 mph because I couldn’t see out the windshield and the road was not clearly visible for the center line nor the sides and where the berm existed or dropped off into a ditch.
Monday found us on the road to our family physician in Cle Elum (35 miles away) for working on the ear wax filling John’s right ear and keeping him from hearing, and for lab tests (and blood draw) for Nancy. The Doc claims that ear grunge almost always occurs in only one ear. Why? [The “over the counter” remedy didn’t work, thus the trip to the pro.] On the way up, it was not snowing, but it started as we pulled into town, and continued, all the way home.
Tuesday was a slow day, except I used all morning to organize the play list for our upcoming performance of our music group. We will try it out tomorrow at the Hearthstone facility in town. After that is over, we will go to the Community Thanksgiving dinner. It’s always fun. One of the women in my exercise class is cooking one of the several turkeys they provided at the center for volunteers.
Winter has arrived. We have about 8 inches of snow from the last two days of its snowing hard. John has been doing lots of chores getting ready, and it’s a good thing. Today he put black sunflower seeds in a bird feeder and hung it up in a walnut tree to keep it out of reach of the deer. The quail found it amazingly fast. There were juncos and starlings (we think), in our mountain ash tree eating berries. The starlings were all puffed up and sitting on the branches. We only saw one or two moving around eating. Maybe the others were full and resting. Later in the day, they were joined by Flickers. Before long, ALL the berries were gone.
Report on Tuesday’s dinner. John fixed that Hanger Steak mentioned above in Sunday’s report. He cut it across the grain, and the flavor was great, but it was still tough. We had it in a nice gravy with onions & mushrooms, served over mashed cheese potatoes. We had green sugar snap peas with it. We will follow tonight with Marion berry pie and ice cream.
Wednesday will be even colder than today. Tonight it is supposed to drop to single digits and possibly go below zero; they’re calling for minus 4. Last night here it went to 15, but friends in town said it was down to 10 at their house. It is 7 now at the airport at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday.
Okay, Wednesday . . . [Too cold, – 8 here. Lower in the valley it was -12.] . . . is here and I went to town in John’s Subaru (his has gasoline and I didn’t want to have to stand in the cold filling mine). We played music with a lot of Christmas songs added to some of our regular repertoire of old time music. We were a hit and everyone enjoyed singing along and thanking us afterwards. It makes it worthwhile. I visited with a 92 year old lady who came up especially to tell me thank you and how much she enjoys us, but then she said, “You are looking so much better than before.” I was happy to tell her I no longer have any infection. She smiled and gave me a hug. The residents there love us as family. Before we started, I was talking with a woman in a wheel chair. She looked up and saw the silver necklace I had on, on top of a black long sleeve “tee” shirt. It is of a lone wolf, baying at the moon. She said, “Is that a wolf around your neck ?” I answered yes it was and told her where it came from in northern Idaho. (given to me by friends, after they visited the wolf sanctuary there – 50 miles NE of Spokane, WA).
http://www.wolfpeopleofcocolalla.com/index.html
She said, “You need to come to my room and see all my wolf stuff. I just love the creatures. I once had a wolf from a “pup” in Alaska.” So we visited a little longer and she told me all about him. Then it was time for us to start playing music so I had to leave the conversation.
Then off to Rite Aid to buy some Alcohol Swabs for my neighbor. Then on to the Community Thanksgiving Dinner. My music group had already gotten there but I was able to join them at the table. We were served a plate full: Turkey, potatoes and dressing, with gravy, a veggie medley of cut up carrots, corn, and peas, a roll and butter, cranberry sauce on the table, but I cannot have that with the Coumadin I take, and it ended with a piece of pumpkin pie. Now tomorrow I will have another meal with turkey. [Coumadin and vitamin K intake have to be consistent. Thus, foods with K, such as cranberries, can be eaten but overall the same quantity has to be eaten each day. Keeping track of the details and then eating some everyday is so difficult that most folks just don’t eat any of the things on the list of high Vitamin K foods.]
Thursday, Happy Thanksgiving. We were up early with a 7:30 a.m. phone call from a friend wishing us a Happy Thanksgiving. We left the house at 12:30 to go to our neighbors. I helped with peeling carrots and putting relishes into a serving dish: homemade pickles, prunes, and canned olives. There was quite the feast. One of the daughters-in-law baked and brought the turkey, dressing and gravy. Her daughter made rolls and a Jell-O/pear salad. John made Blueberry/grated apples pie and an apple pie. We brought home enough of both to cut and fit half of each into a pan to freeze for me to take to a potluck Dec 3rd at the senior center where I will play Christmas music with an accordionist (just the two of us). The lady of the house today, made a large pumpkin pie that was superb. Also, she made yams, mashed potatoes, and a cranberry/marshmallow dish. Another neighbor brought a green bean casserole. There was enough food for an army. We enjoyed the company and stayed till almost dark, needing to get home for John to feed the horses. Our dogs were good while we were away, and ready to go outside when we got home. It is too cold to leave the window (doggy door) open now. That limits the time we can stay away.
I came home and worked on transposing more music for our clarinet player. I have done 12 small songs for the Taize’ service next week, Dec. 5th. I have about that many left. I’m learning how to use the program, and getting better at it. Remember, I have to do it with the computer, clicking note by note, one whole note above the one written on the music I’m transposing from. The program knows how to change the key to one appropriate for a B flat clarinet. This procedure was written up in last week’s blog.
Friday will be a slow day. Maybe I will get some bills paid and tax receipts filed. (I didn’t, but I did transpose some more Taize’ music for the clarinet.) There is no exercise class because the senior center is closed for Thanksgiving. We don’t really have any reason to go to town. John needed to do the chores with horses, birds, and giving apples to the deer. I can help with the dogs and sighting the deer… as they come to the back fence to beg. The buck (4 points on each side) came to the back fence, and John threw him some apples. He let John walk out and take pictures as he was eating them. Sorry we cannot put pictures in this blog. If you want to see him, let us know and we will send to your email address (be sure we have it). Send your request to nancyh@ellensburg.com please.
John dissected a beef heart we got from our friends when they butchered their cows (mentioned above on Sunday). I took pictures while he cut through and examined various portions and tried to match parts with drawings. John looked for photos on the web but there are only drawings of not much use for his intent. Also, the hearts we had were sliced off at the top and sliced into the chambers to let them drain. Still, we could see quite a lot. The nerve fibers for electrical signaling inside the heart were all there. This suggested link is a bit technical, but still useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_conduction_system_of_the_heart
The bands for closing the valves (chordae tendinae)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chordae_tendineae
were mostly there but some damage had been done by the person removing the heart so that was disappointing. The surface arteries were there but the major veins and arteries to and from the lungs and elsewhere were all nearly gone. So if you want to try this, ask for a more complete specimen.
Saturday was a slow day, but we did go to town shopping and to deliver some apples. I spent a lot of time in the afternoon transposing the rest of the Taize’ music for my friend who plays the clarinet. John did all the normal chores with the animals, including feeding apples to the deer and sunflower seeds to the birds, who knock them out of the feeder (up in the walnut tree) on the ground and the deer eat them too. He hangs it way up in the tree to keep the deer from raiding the bird feeder, as we have had happen in the past. Somewhere we have a picture of a large buck standing on back legs eating from the feeder.
I guess I should stop this and get it to John to put on the blog tonight. Sunday will be pretty much the same as last week. Nothing special is planned.
We hope your Thanksgiving was as good as ours, and that next week will be a good one for you.
Ours will be full of events… and we’ll tell you next blog. Till then, our best regards to you and thanks for reading our news. We are so happy to be able to report good health news, instead of what’s been filling most of this blog since last Dec 4th, when John began doing the reports.
Nancy