Look at that, there's some buds with tiny leaves on several of the shrubs around the property!
I'm not quite sure what they are but they look pretty whatever they are!

It's still quite rainy, off and on, and the grounds are saturated and muddy most of the time.
Apparently we have overnight visitors ..



Those are raccoon prints of course. One of these days I'm going to set up a little trail-cam to see what else comes by in the night.
I really don't see anything during the day other than birds, compliments of a certain dog .. she chases everything away .. sigh.

                                                              

Due to the mild winter there's enough food to be found, these Scrub Jays are happy about the many acorns that are laying around ..

Amidst all the grey and wet there was a sparkle of brightness and color in the form of Mardi Gras aka Fat or Shrove Tuesday!
Having spend two winters in Louisiana, we've gotten in the habit of celebrating this wildly festive day, which marks the final day of 'Ordinary Time' before the solemn season of Lent commences on Ash Wednesday.
Mainly because of the food and the parades of course since we're not religious at all.

Portland has it's own Krewe (a club or organization that exists to celebrate Carnival), the Mysti Krewe of Nimbus.
If you know Oregon it's probably not surprising to hear they usually have their parades in the rain:

They don't have any less fun though! We (again) didn't go this year .. maybe next time.

I did bake a King Cake though:

                                          

                                                                                                                              

I use a different recipe every year, but this time I repeated last year's since we agreed it was pretty much the best one ever.
The only thing I changed was to cut the ingredients in half, which gave us a smaller cake that's still more than enough for 2 people.
Even now I froze half of it!

I also baked another loaf of bread:

This time I used my new sourdough starter. It was rising consistently and looked bubbly enough but it's still quite 'young' so I added a little yeast to give it some extra lift.



I also used the bread-machine from start to finish which gives it a lot less time to rise and proof than without but it came out looking really good.
Not very 'sour' yet, but good enough for a first bake!


And if that wasn't fun and healthy enough I also started to grow my own 'sprouts'!

               

I buy them regularly in the stores but I always balk at the high prices.
I mean, come on, $4 for some sprouted seeds .. really!?
It's very easy to do. Just spread some seeds on a paper towel, spray them with water and keep them in the dark for a couple of days.

These still have to grow taller and green up ..

                                 

After the little leaves appear you place them in the light and wait until they have grown to a decent height after you can start harvesting.
They're really good, and healthy, on sandwiches and in salads.
How cool is that?!

We don't have any appraisals at the moment so James is still working on his to-do list.
Here he's modifying the little table that sits between our chairs. Our new chairs are a little bigger than the previous ones so the table had to shrink some ..

                                                                                 
After which it had to be repainted.

The master at work!

Well, that was about it for this week.

I can't believe we're already halfway February ..

Here's a last food-picture of the soup we had on Mardi Gras which of course had to be Gumbo, only our most favorite soup ever!