Another rainy week for the books! Seriously, will it ever stop?
Somebody complained about it on 'Nextdoor' and immediately got the reply 'First time here?'
It was meant to be funny but at the same time it is quite sad because it is so true .. welcome to Oregon, where it rains .. in winter .. all the time!

'Our' property looks like this ..

Mud, mud, mud and than some! My go-to shoes these days (on my walks) are my rain-boots and my jeans constantly show mud splatters everywhere ..
We're happy with the gravel around the RV though, it works great for not having to walk through the mud to the car or draining the tanks or feeding the birds.

Fortunately I own a good rain jacket, bought in Tillamook of all places about 20 years ago when we went for a 2 week RV-trip along the coast on Highway #1!
Must be really good quality since it's still holding up fine.



When I went to town the other day I looked at the (Yamhill) river which runs alongside the road and although it's far from overflowing it's water-level is way up at the moment:

Our pond next to the RV is actually back to overflowing again, but that's a good thing, because it overflows through the culvert and into the lower pond like it's supposed to do.
And although it's a small pond, it being so full at the moment attracted a flock of geese the other day ..

Despite flying in together they looked to be two different groups/families because there was a little hissing and chasing going on before they settled down.
They kept a little distance between them the whole time they were here ..

In one of the smaller ponds down the hill from us I found a couple of  Hooded Mergansers again. They visit quite frequently:



My feeders are always busy although I cannot seem to attract much of a variety of birds over here. No Nuthatches or Chickadees, no Titmice or Woodpeckers .. none of my regulars from the previous places we lived at.
I'm guessing they all flock to the towns in winter where there's more people having feeders up ..

Every now and than a few Red-winged Black birds that live among the reeds of the small pond are coming over.
Those I'd rather not have around though because they make a big mess of the mixed seeds, throwing everything out they don't like!

             

And on a rare occasion I've seen this Varied Thrush:

                                        

It's a 'new-to-me' bird and, just like the Black birds, I've only been able to take a few shots through the window.
Since our windows are covered with a slightly darkening, UV-blocking (although clear) window-film, pictures always come out rather fuzzy.
One of these days I'll get a better shot!

It looks like this blog is a little heavy in nature content this time. Mostly because there's not much else to see or do at the moment.
Here's a few pics of some fungi that caught my eye on my last walk. This rain of lately is of course just their ticket to thrive!

And how about this Orange Jelly fungus .. feels just as squeegee as jello!

          


Well, that's as much as I could get together for this week. I've made a sauerkraut casserole for dinner tonight.
Of course I forgot to take a picture but it looked something like this (sauerkraut with raisins and pine-apple, mashed potatoes, and ground beef):

Comfort-food!

 

Last weeks cold spell gave us some spectacular sunrises!

Getting up and out to make pictures was another thing though because not only is sunrise quite early around 7.30 am but it was also colder than a witch's tit (I've been waiting for an opportunity to say that) with night temperatures hoovering around 20F!

                     

Some other exciting news this week: look who's officially an old fart now (65) and eligible for medicare:

                                         

He'd requested cinnamon rolls for breakfast, lunch and dinner so I made a few .. or twelve!

                                      

     

          No calories in these .. 😂

Just kiddin' about dinner (only half kidding to be honest) but there were, also per request, BBQ ribs, his favorite birthday-dinner since he was a little kid!

Although this was somewhat of a major birthday we didn't 'do' anything special that day, mainly due to the fact that we'd had an ice-storm coming through the day before which left us with a thick layer of very, very slippery ice everywhere!

It's hard to see but that's all ice in the pic above, even the car was covered ..

Needles to say we didn't go anywhere!

I did venture out to feed my birds but I had to be creative getting to the feeders and not end up in the pond.
I ended up using two towels, changing from one to stand on and one to lay in front of me, thus making my way slowly forward .. and back.

At least they were grateful. Among the regular flock of Black-eyed Juncos and common Sparrows I know have some House Finches and a Fox-sparrow ..

   

                               
And although sugar-water doesn't freeze as fast as plain water, with these extremely low temperatures I had to freeze-proof the Hummingbird feeder somehow or I had to go out and defrost it every couple of hours.
As usual Googling gave me several options. I went for the easiest one which suggested somehow attaching some hand warmers to the feeder and covering it with something to insulate.

  

I actually used a spare water bowl that came with my feeder station, lined it with aluminum foil and bubble-wrap, inserted the hand-warmers (or in my case toe warmers) and strapped the feeder on top with some bungee-cords.
And it worked, it didn't freeze all day!

                                            

What helped a little as well was that the sun came out for a couple of hours each day although the overall air-temperature still didn't rise above 24F most days!

After a couple of freezing nights, and days, we had a little ice on the ponds but not enough to skate .. not that I have any skates anymore.

        


At least we did have a little winter this year. I take it!

Unfortunately the weather forecast is showing lots of rain in the near future again and soon all that beautiful white will be history.
Yesterday afternoon the clouds were already rolling in ..

Since it was too cold to go out for much longer than about half an hour or so I only took a few short walks to take some pictures each day but spend most of the day inside where our heaters did a great job keeping us warm and toasty.

Besides lots of reading, spinning and knitting, fixing all kinds of comfort food and (spiked) hot chocolates, I finished this cute and colorful puzzle.
Much easier than the previous one!

                                               

Not really appropriate for 'the season' but it will be spring again, sometime ... but hopefully not too soon.

I'd love a little more winter (famous last words)!

 

Yes, we finally got some .. snow!
After weeks and weeks of rain it's such a relief to finally have something nice coming down from the heavens although it's still very dark and gloomy out there.

But not before the last bit of rain last week caused an over-saturated, old and dead tree-top to come down and take out the power-line coming into the road we're on:

                                                                           

It's hard to see but that was the tree-top in the picture above and below is the cable hanging down on the ground and over the fence.

We'd lost power at midnight and didn't think it would be back on until at least that evening and most likely for a couple of days, since we live on a rural road and due to the weather there were constantly lines down in the area.
But by some miracle they repaired it that morning and at 10.30 it came back on! Yahoo!
Nothing makes you more appreciative to have power than when you lose it for a couple of hours ..

James had to go out for an appraisal and almost brought back a generator since we don't have one anymore but with electricity restored and finances not quite 'up-to-par' (yet), we're holding off on buying one a little longer.



If you look carefully you can see how hard it rained here at times ... (those light stripes at the top of the pic).
The pond is full and overflowing again into the one below.

When you're a duck it doesn't bother you one bit I guess, although I took this picture of a female Bufflehead during a rare clearing in the weather.
The males showed up a little later but I scared them off coming around the corner with my camera so no pictures unfortunately ..

                                              

But yeah, temperatures started to plummet today, snow began to fall overnight and the forecast looks like this:

 

Not a whole lot of snow but definitely cold and icy!
This was the temp this morning:

                                                                      

Brrrr! We turned on the heating-coil that wraps around our water-hose. Hopefully that will be enough (together with some insulation wrappings) to keep it from freezing.

Fortunately we did all our groceries on Thursday and don't have to go anywhere until Wednesday when we have another appraisal.
I picked up 2 dozen of eggs as well today from our new fresh-egg provider (Kim) here in town whom I found recently on Nextdoor.
We go through a lot of them and don't wanna be without!

'My' wild birds are eating up a storm. I added another pole to my set-up and divided all the feed tubes I have between the two. This way there's a little more room for everyone ..

           

This weather definitely calls for comfort-food so I made a nice beef-stew:

           

And for this weekend there's a big pot of 'Snert' aka Dutch pea-soup:

                       

We'll see how cold it gets and how much more snow will fall and hopefully we won't loose electricity again.
It's one thing if it happens when it's a balmy 46F but it's a whole 'nother' story when it's in the 10s or 20s!

                

Happy New Year Y'all! I liked this picture with a dutch windmill but the New Year on both ends, Oregon as well as Holland, looked more like this:

                                

Records are broken left and right for the wettest months (and/or year) of 2023.
Oregon has remained in some form of drought since the fall of 2019 but if it manages to continue to receive above-average rainfall and a normal amount of snow during the 2023-2024 wet season, state climatologists believe the state could fully recover from the ongoing drought.
So far, it looks like that's not going to be a problem, it rains almost every day!

                  

Anyway, regardless of the rain, the year came to an end as usual, and as usual we bid it farewell with a traditional meal of lobster on Old-Years Eve.
We even added a steak to make it 'surf-and-turf', since it had been in the freezer for a while and needed to be eaten.
Also as usual we didn't stay up until 12am, there's no way we can stay awake until than, but fortunately the year changed all by itself and we woke up to a whole new one!

And of course in our house that means ... oliebollen!
James did a stellar job once again, actually we agreed these were some of his best ever.

                                                       

Another tradition, I guess we have quite a few come to think of it, is our evening meal of black-eyed peas on New year's day.
(the peas represent coins, the greens paper money, tomatoes for health, pork since a pig always roots forward and corn bread for gold).
Basically it is said to bring good luck and who cannot use a bit of that?

There's one tradition we totally spaced on that day though which was watching the Rose Parade on TV.
I don't know how that happened but we missed it. Bummer .. oh, well.

OK, enough of all the food already! Like we do nothing else than eat .. OK, with this weather that's basically a lot of what we do, I guess.
The birds actually agree by the way, and more have found their way to my feeders.
There's a huge flock of Starlings that comes by every now and than:

They arrive 'en masse' ..



And leave the same way, all together in a huge, noisy cloud of wings and feathers ..

Sometimes when they take to the sky, they swoop and swirl into spheres, planes and waves. The phenomenon is called a murmuration, and it's named after the noise that is made by the many flapping wings of a group of starlings in flight.
It's an awesome sight!

That's about it I think. The rain has kept us mostly inside, except for a couple of appraisals we've done this week.
Fortunately they keep coming in, and it looks like it's even picking up a little.
Many people have postponed having their houses appraised until 'after the holidays' we think and we're getting some more calls as of lately.

I've been working on a monster of a puzzle over the holidays and finally, finally got it done!
There were several moments I wanted to give up on this one, that's how difficult it was to make!

It's not so much the image, which has enough variation in colors and shapes I think, but it's the shapes of the puzzle pieces themselves ... 'Bits and pieces' it says on the box, which should have warned me I guess because that's what they are!

But I persevered and got it done!
It was a puzzle I exchanged with my landlord by the way and I picked up a few more from her when I returned this one.
Hopefully they'll be a little easier, I purposely choose at least one that has more 'normal' puzzle pieces ..