A night away

Christmas day was filled with family, fun, and delicious food. We celebrated with Dave's parents, his sisters and their families. Dave's Mom and Dad called at 12:45 to say they were just leaving and would be arriving a couple of hours late. Their late arrival created a long downtime since it was too early to cook. My Christmas present from Dave was a popcorn popper, so we made a bunch of popcorn, ate some of Dave's amazing Christmas fudge, and enjoyed one another. It ended up being my favorite part of the day.

Christmas dinner was wonderful! Dave deep fried two small heritage turkeys, a Naragansett and a Red Bourbon; they tasted fabulous. Amy and I used quite a few of the vegetables from my Stella Gardens winter CSA box. We had gingered beets, caraway cabbage with apple and onions, carrots with mustard and butter (Nathaniel's favorite), creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, salad, and freshly baked bread. For dessert we had more fudge and Betty's Christmas cookies.

On Christmas Eve our neighbors came over to meet the dogs and learn my chore routine, since their daughter was doing chores for me one morning and evening on the 26th and 27th. Their help meant we could spend the night in Northbrook for Zachary's final performance and Ken's (Dave's Dad) surprise birthday party.

Jackson was pushy enough with our visitors that we decided to keep the dogs in their outdoor kennel. Although the kennel has an insulated dog house (rated to -40 Dave likes to remind me), I still don't like to leave them out in the winter. We discussed with K. that we would hook up the dog's heated water bucket, and that I would leave extra water with all the other animals so that they would not have to carry water.

I thought I would be able to leave extra water by the animal housing because for some reason I misread the weather report and thought the 30 to 40 degree weather would last through Sunday. Sunday morning I awoke to 16 degree temperatures. Extra water would turn into huge ice cubes.

We planned to leave at 7:00am so I started my animal chores at 6:00am. The heat lamp and water heater were not working in the chicken house so their waterer was frozen shut. I spent twenty minutes trying to fix the electrical problem on my own and then decided to ask Dave for help after I finished with the goats.

Dave was able to quickly fix the electrical problem in the chicken coop since the solution involved plugging the system back into the main outlet. I tried not to feel too foolish. I had been carefully checking each of the cords to be certain they were well seated in the outlet, I merely failed to notice that they were no longer plugged into the power source. Clearly electricity is not my strong point.

While I was doing my chores, Dave had been trying to find the heated dog bowl. We both remembered seeing it on the back porch near the grill earlier in the week. Unfortunately, six inches of snow had fallen and then frozen hard. We both took turns shoveling sections of snow off the porch until feeling overwhelmed with the apparent futility of our quest, we gave up. I placed a bucket of water on a cat bed heating pad inside a dog crate against the inner wall of the dog kennel. When I returned home I discovered that my ingenious solution had not worked. K. had added one of her heated water buckets to the kennel and my bucket of water was resting on the heating pad frozen solid. K. had lowered a heated bucket from her farm into the kennel with the dogs. My heartsank when I saw the extra work my missing dog bowl had caused.

We had a wonderful time in Chicago and were so grateful to our neighbors for how well they cared for our animals despite my errors in judgement. Apologies, apologies, apologies.

As for the dog bowl, it is still buried in snow, hopefully it will reappear in the Spring!