Female Gambel's Quail

It's been a grey but fairly 'warm' week so far, the forecasted snow and frost didn't really happen, although it got terrible windy again.
We'd already tightened up the awnings over the slides last time it blew like this, but now we even anchored down the wooden slat we use to keep the material from flapping, to stop it from slamming up and down on the slide roof. 
We spent a long, sleepless night wide awake because of it! 

                                                                                                

Hard to see but there's a rope leading from the plank on top of the awning, down to the belly of the RV.

At the job site we braced the porta-toilet, since it blew over during the last storm. And that is nas-ty!

    
Even the guys are sometimes struggling to keep upright when a particular strong gust barrels through the canyon!
Talking about the job .. the first phase of the foundation-footing is finished! Yeah!



After the forms were in, a whole bunch of steel was put into place ..

Looks like this house is not going anywhere soon! (You'd think?)

Soon thereafter the cement was delivered!

       

There was a small window between upcoming snow and frost, so James seized the moment!

Ta-da, done and curing ..

Just in time, because take a look at this forecast:

You think it might snow?

Brrrr, I'm gonna run down to Riggins today to do some major grocery-shopping, and than I'm gonna hole up and might go into hibernation! I'm a bear, am I not?
Well, I might do some puzzling, I finally just finished 'Santa's Workshop':

 

It was a bear (ha, see what I did there?), but I got it done! 
But of course I'm a glutton for punishment, so I've already started the next one, 'New Year's party' .. which looks equally difficult:

We'll see how it goes, it looks like I'm going to have enough time on my hands! 
Time to do some more baking perhaps? 
I made one of James' favorites, a pineapple upside-down cake, but he's eating his way through it like there's no tomorrow .. and than what ?!
I'll probably make a batch of brownies, always a winner.

                                         

Merl's having nothing of this cold and windy weather and is already hibernating ..

He sleeps an awful lot, but he eats fine and his blood sugars are fairly stable, so life is good ..

                                        

                                     A little weird every now and than, but good!

And so life goes on as usual in this bright and shiny new year of 2020 ..  a little weird but mostly good! 

  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!

Christmas 2019 was a very nice, quiet and relaxed one in the Hess-mobile, as you can see!

We didn't plan on doing a thing, other than have some nice things to eat, listen to Christmas Carrol's, watch a movie and lounge around in the warm and cozy RV!
And that's exactly what we did!

There were lots of cookies (and pie), and I baked a Christmas 'Stollen', that by some miracle survived being baked too long and at the wrong setting and wrapped in cling-wrap (don't ask) ..

It was delicious! (Beats me ..)

As I said, we did watch a movie ..

Can you see it .. no, not 'It's a wonderful life' this year, but .. yup! 'The sound of music'.

It's two days later now, and I still can't get 'climb every mountain' out of my head .. sigh ..

We had a delicious dinner! We managed to not screw up the meat (rib-eye steak), the scalloped potatoes came out great and the Brussel sprouts (with onion and bacon) were terrific!

All of this accompanied by another great Pinot Noir, rejected by but with compliments of Doug!

I'd high hopes for a white Christmas this year, being this far north, but no such luck .. it did get frosty overnight though, so it looked somewhat white ..

     
You got to take what you can get ..

When we took a little Christmas-day-walk to the river, we even noticed some ice on the north side (down-river) of the rocks ..

Halfway up the hillside, on the other side of the river, we also spotted a small herd of Mule Deer:

As I mentioned in the previous post, these deer have much larger ears than their cousins, the White-Tail Deer.
But another way to the distinguish the two is that black tip of their tail, the White-Tail's are all .. well, white, go figure!

 

I've also been trying to get a good shot of this little wren, who lives somewhere close around the house, but the little guy just doesn't sit still!

 

He's very vocal, very tiny and so cute! 

                    It's a Winter Wren .. how appropriate!

And than there's this:

 Yes! We have a floor plan! Hallelujah!

 

James couldn't wait to begin working on the foundation, so the day after Christmas he and Bart started early to measure and mark where everything had to go, and Don started to dig the trenches for the concrete!

 

Finally, progress!

Also, although our Christmas was nice and quiet and relaxed, I still might need some psychiatric help if, IF, I ever finish this totally crazy puzzle!

My Mom send it to me, there's actually two of them in the one box,  by a dutch cartoonist, Jan van Haasteren. 
This one is called 'Santa's Toy Factory' and the other one 'New Years party'.
They're insanely difficult, there's so much going on in each one (look at all those elves!), but also so much fun to make!

 

This doesn't help of course!