A happy New Year Y'all!

And there we are, in the new year, at the start of a new decade. 
Another 'roaring twenties'? Time will tell!
So far we're off to a good start, James made 'oliebollen' and boy, they were good!

He baked them in the laundry room of  'the house' (no smelly RV!) , behind closed doors .. (secret recipe, you know)

 

 Making the dough was my contribution ..

 

   

They were delicious, very airy and not greasy at all! 

James likes them with cherries, I prefer them plain .. but with a heavy dusting of sugar of course!

We watched the Rose Parade out of Pasadena (and our favorite State of all, California) on TV :

And just had a very nice, relaxing rest of the day. 
Rather than watching TV in the evening, we played a game of dominoes, called Mexican Train.

Merl' thought is was fun to shuffle the stones ..

As usual I skunked James, although I almost lost it in the end-game (gained 100 points in one sweep, for a narrow win of 158 versus James' 167)!

We agreed we should play games more often, it was a lot of fun! Maybe establish a once a week game-night? We'll see ..

The weather has been a little warmer this last week, above freezing at least, with temperatures somewhere in the high 30s, low 40s.
Which was good news for the guys who were working on framing the forms for the foundation.

 

It's pretty much done by now, and the plan is to pour concrete next Tuesday. 

It needs 48 hours of temperatures above 32F to set and cure, and

the weather forecast is for snow and frosty nights starting on Thursday, so hopefully it will be in, and dry, by than!

I've spotted two groups of Mule Deer and a herd of Elk this week:

 
These are the deer, not easy to see (enlarging makes it even blurrier), but the one on the front left is a buck!

And this is the Elk herd, all cows I think ..

Just in case you wanna know .. male deer are bucks and female are does, where as male elk are bulls and the female cows .. yeah, confusing!

For our New Year's day dinner I made a big pot of traditional southern black-eyed peas (for pennies/good luck), with collards (for paper money/prosperity), ham-hock (pigs root forward when foraging and represent positive motion), stewed tomatoes (wealth/health) and corn-bread (gold/coins).
Hey, we need all the help we can get! 😁

 

By the way, instead of our usual lobsters, we had jumbo-scallops for dinner on New Year's eve. 

I usually love those but this time they didn't do it for me. Next time it will be lobsters again!

All in all we had a wonderful holiday season, relaxed and peaceful, catching up on a lot of small chores, re-organizing, searching the Internet, spinning, puzzling, etc, etc  ..

 Let's hope it will continue to be like this!