It’s been almost a year and a half since I last wrote anything. 2025 is a year best forgotten and which needs to be remembered in a lot of other ways.
We lost two members of our family in 2025 late in the year. I’ve mostly stopped crying at the drop of a hat. Mostly.
I still can’t bring myself to clean this blanket of his cat hair.
2024 and 2025 were the warmest winters we’ve ever had here. We saw very little snowfall over the course of both winters, and whatever snow fell didn’t linger. It was weird.
March started off with no snow on the ground at all. Granted, it does start warming up around the middle of March. But still, no snow??
I played with a lot of lace knitting in 2025, making patterns for scarves and a shawl. Then I hurt my hand in late 2025 and haven’t been able to do any knitting since – will be so glad when that’s fixed.
It’s always amazing how many mistakes I find in a pattern when I’m actually knitting something for the first time. Feels good to fix the mistakes and know the next time will be easier.
The beginning of May is also gardening time. And we are there again. We have tomatoes and peppers to plant. We already planted new strawberries in three beds and the weeds are trying to choke them out. This weekend we will have to do a lot of garden work.
Up to June 2025.
I’m so going to miss Mishkin the next time I sit there to work on a project. He always wanted to participate by putting his paw on my knitting and then giving me a totally innocent look.
This year somebody ate our peonies!!! Just when they were ready to be picked, too. They ate all of them (I suspect deer).
I’ll making another one of these as soon as my hand is up to the task. It’s getting closer.
A few days ago in May 2026, Dan saw something out of the window and it looked so strange. It was a hen turkey standing in some fairly tall grass and she had her neck stretched up as far as it would go; she looked more like a goose than a turkey, like a goose with small babies.
She shook her feathers and babies exploded from underneath, and they were flying around!! Who knew those stubby little wings would be enough to launch her babies into the air. They were tiny, way smaller than the ones in the picture above.
Later in the evening she came back to our front yard, with her herd around her, still behaving very paranoid and watchful. She walked around a pile of dirt we have next to the garden, and the babies were grazing around her and chasing each other, behaving like little lunatics. Here came another hen turkey and we wondered how that would go. Would the mom tolerate this other adult or not? Answer: Hell no. Chaos ensued.
The next morning the whole family was once again in our front yard, under the lilac tree/bush, and this time the mom had two other adult hen turkeys to contend with. She was not a happy camper; her feathers were all fluffed and sticking up every which way, very agitated. She concentrated on chasing the other adults while her babies behaved like babies, chasing each other in and around the lilac. It was so much fun to watch the riot.
We froze the onions in the fall once they got big, plus we were eating them fresh through the summer, and we still have plenty of onions to take us to harvest this fall. Our new plants are already in the ground and starting to look good.
July is fun because all the fruit plants kick into high gear and it’s harvesting time. This year we’re not going to get much in the way of strawberries. Next year, assuming we can get the weeds under some semblance of control, it will be full speed ahead, but not this year. The raspberries will probably make up for it, though, so we will survive.
Last year we had a pretty good harvest of the currants, but this year is going to be huge! The plants are totally weighed down with fruit. I froze them last summer, thinking I would make jelly, but then 2025 sucked and I never got around to doing that. Need to change that this year, for sure.
We aren’t sure what’s going on with the josta berry plants. The plants themselves look good but they set hardly any fruit again this year. We bought some fertilizer so will do that this summer and late in the fall to see if that helps next year.
This year the plants are blooming really well, and we are optimistic about the harvest. It makes outrageously good pies and tarts. Not to mention jam and eating fresh.
Last year we had friends visiting from New Orleans, and they stayed in a hotel up in Grand Forks. The border patrol thought it was weird to come so far to visit for such a short time, and so our friends showed them a picture of this tart. Then it all made sense to the border patrol!!
Now a bunch of miscellaneous pictures in no particular order, taking me up through the end of May 2026.
We did eventually get an electrician in to move all the 110 circuits to a sub-panel, as well as the 220 circuit for the well. So now when the power goes out, which happens way too often, it doesn’t interfere with most of the things we do. If we happened to be using the electric range it would definitely interfere but so far that hasn’t happened. One possible problem has been eliminated – being in a shower when the power went out as there are no windows and it’s very very dark when the door is closed. We’ve had power outages of one sort or another at least half a dozen times since this backup power system was put into place. We love not having to deal with a gasoline generator and extension cords.
Because all that electric work on the wall behind the TV and below the existing main panel is not exactly attractive to look at, I made a wall hanging as a quilt using a picture we took on one of our trips to the Alaskan Bush when we spent the winter. It is one of our favorite pictures.
This looks so much better than seeing all the things on the shelves. It makes the bedroom feel much more organized.
It’s also how I hurt my hand. I won’t be doing that again. My hands are just too small and there wasn’t really a way to scale it down for me. See, I can learn!!
This one evening in March we had at least a hundred turkeys surrounding the house, on both sides. I only took pictures of the ones in the front yard.
Dan won’t let me feed these guys for some reason. He thinks we’d have 500 of them in the yard!
This all brings the blog up to date as far as pictures go. Haven’t really done much this year besides get used to not having our pets which has been really weird, and do a little bit of traveling to bird watch. It has given us both the desire to move to where birding would be a super easy thing to do; maybe we’ll get to do that next year. Who knows. It all depends on the real estate market, both here and on the coast. Now it isn’t going to work as the real estate market here is being bizarre. So we will concentrate on other things, like our garden. We have an overabundance of weeds to deal with, and plans on how to tackle them.
I know I left a lot of things out, but that’s what happens when you get this far behind on things.