Life's Good!

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Spring is progressing rapidly, the days have been warm (70s!) and the bees are buzzing ..
I found these blossoms on the river-side of 'our' hills, I think they're apple-blossoms. I couldn't remember if I'd seen apples on these trees last year, until I remembered that we were at Brust all summer and Fall, so I couldn't have anyways ..

Not a bee but a Spider wasp (I think)

A little further down the road I almost stepped on this caterpillar, munching away on some tender young leaves. It might be a White Ermine Moth, but I'm not sure.

Saturday morning we woke up with a whole herd of Whitetail Deer in the yard ..

They were skittish, but brave enough to come down and nibble on the fresh green grass that's coming up fast alongside the creek ..

And than Easter snug up on us once again this Sunday! With everything going on, it was a weird one of course.
People (mostly) staying at home and not visiting family, no Easter mass or other events going on, the Pope delivering his 'Urbi et Orbi' blessing over an empty St. Peter's square ..

Our day was nice and quiet and relaxed. We had nothing planned, it was to cold to golf, and we spend the day mostly inside where it was warm and cozy.
Of course we ate a little fancier ..
I was going to make a braided Easter Bread or something equally appropriate, but I didn't feel like doing the whole kneading, rising and baking thing, so I settled for simple Easter Croissants ..

I came across them on some website and they couldn't be easier to make.
They're just your basic roll-up croissants from a can, which you fill with some raisins, cinnamon and a little dab of butter. (I put some purple, green and yellow sprinkles on them too, to make them a little 'Easter-y'). Delicious!

For lunch we nibbled on our traditional Deviled Eggs (spiced with curry of course) and I tried my hand on making a (cream)cheese ball, which came out OK-ish ..

After all that excitement, oh I forgot to mention the Key-lime pie with coffee, we went for a little drive in Sam's side-by-side, back into the canyon, and all the way up to the state forest at the top.

This is looking down at the house from about halfway up ..

These pretty blue Mountain Kittentails/toes (Synthyris missurica) were flowering everywhere, as well as an early clump of Arrowleaf Balsamroot.

It got pretty cold the further we went up the hill, and since the side-by-side doesn't have a front window the icy wind got us full in the face. Brrr!
The views were spectacular though .. that's Lucile there down below:

And these are the, still snow-covered, mountains of the Seven Devils Mountains wayyy in the distance ..
Eventually we hit snow, and mud, and we decided we had enough cold for tone day and turned around

Looking very 'gangsta' there my man! (In reality, he was freezing his ears off!)

And in between rain, frost, an earthquake, power outages and, oh yeah, a virus .. the roof is coming along, slow but sure ..
We have 3 guys working for us right now, there were 4, but Austin has torn his ankle ligaments (at home) and is out of the running (ha!) for a couple of weeks.

The funny thing is that we've been getting inquiries for work, now that several businesses further away in McCall and Grangeville have laid of their workers because of the virus.

These are the same guys that turned us down previously for various reasons, but now they need the work!

We're not taking anymore on though, more bodies means more chances for getting infected, unless we can find someone with experience, which very few have.

Here in Idaho county we're still at only 3 cases and no deaths, let's hope it'll stay that way!

Let's see, anything else? Oh, yeah, look who-(who-hooo)'s back? The Screech Owls, that reared 2 chicks in the barn last year!

I'm pretty sure they're (he? she?) sitting on eggs, and they're not too happy we're there. They do stand their ground though, and seem to be determined to stay!
If looks could kill though ...