My Cookie Challenge

 In January I decided to change up my cookie baking a bit for 2026.  Cookies are something I make fairly often, as in several times a month, with chocolate chip being the ones I make time and time and time again.  There are a few other flavors thrown in on occasion: sugar, molasses, no-bake, white chocolate macadamia nut, oatmeal butterscotch. . . but far and away chocolate chip is the auto-pilot cookie when I reach for the mixing bowl with the intent of baking cookies.

What I challenged myself to is to make lots of different kinds of cookies this year.  No one recipe back to back, and no chocolate chip cookies twice in the same month, maybe not even in the same season.

So far, I have made cookies five times in 2026 and I have only (just this week!) made chocolate chip once.  Yay for diversity!

Despite the non-chocolate chip cookie pictures in this post, which I dug up from my files, I have made none of those cookies yet this year.  What I have made are

• molasses
• walnut/pecan chocolate chunk (used both walnuts and pecans because I was short on walnuts)
• oatmeal
• "Ritz" (Ritz crackers sandwiched with peanut butter and dipped in melted chocolate then allowed to cool)
• chocolate chip

There are lots and lots of cookie recipes out there.  So why not explore them and have a whole year of different kinds of cookies?

The Warmest Day Yet

 Yesterday was the warmest day we've had so far this year.  The thermometer on the deck at this little place here hit 64 degrees in the mid-afternoon.  I actually went out and did chores in just a sweatshirt, no coat, not even a jacket! A novelty for February in Michigan.

The vast majority of our snow has melted away and the ground is, for the most part, thawed.  The heavy traffic areas around the barn and pastures feature inches deep mud--oh joy!

The Poetess had the urge to run and play when I turned the horses out in the morning; she ran laps, trying and trying her best to get the other horses to race with her to no luck.  The LBM and Tubbs were both more interested in checking to see if any tiny blades of grass might be growing where snow was the day before than in running.  Crockett would oblige Poetess by rearing up every time she came running up to the fence line where he stood but he wouldn't do more than trot a few steps before coming to a halt again.  He's in his mid-20s, which is rather elderly for a horse, so I don't blame him for not feeling like zooming around.

Of course they all had to have a good roll in the mud during the course of the day and came in that night varying shades of dun rather than three blacks and a bay.

I took advantage of the sunshine and warmth of the afternoon to give water buckets a good scrubbing.  It was nice to be cleaning them outside without freezing my bare hands in the water while doing so.  All winter bucket scrubbing has either happened in the tack room sink where rinsing is difficult without spraying water around the room, or outside with absolutely freezing hands and still trying not to let water go wild; especially where it might freeze and create ice in a walkway.

By the horses' dinner time the 'high' heat of the day had brewed up a thunderstorm and they were more than happy to meet me at the pasture gates to come in before the rumbling thunder actually brought rain to us.

Shortly after I had them all tucked into their stalls for the night, the rain did get to this little place here.  I made it into the house before it got heavy and the hail started pelting down.  We had pea- to dime-sized hail for about 10 minutes straight.

But even while it was still hailing the sun was coming back out to the West, which meant we got treated to a nice rainbow in the East.

It was a good, and not too windy, first thunderstorm of the year.

Nothing Says I Love You Like. . .

. . . Spending several hours on Valentine's Day working in the woods together.

At least, at this little place here it says "I Love You."  Spending a warm sunny winter afternoon cutting up blow downs for future firewood is about as frugal and loving as you can get.  LOL.

A nice maple tree, lying on the ground

That nice maple tree, cut into 8' lengths and stacked on the tractor forks.

After taking the logs from that maple tree up to the wood boiler area, we returned to the woods and cut up several more 'small' (ie. skinny-ish) trees to make a second load of logs.  Some I loaded, others DH had to carry from where they were cut to the tractor to put on the forks.

He's not just good looking, he's strong!

(No picture of me, but I can carry logs about 2/3 that diameter--note the ones all ready on the forks.  I'm strong too!)

Another tree we tackled together was a huge beech that came down in the big storm we had at the end of March last year.  (You can read about house/outbuilding damage here.)  The busted off stump is about as tall as I am.  Unlike me, it was quite rotten inside. 

It is also quite big around; neither DH nor I could get our arms around it.  Maybe if we'd tried joining our hands together we could have spanned it with our arms.  Maybe.

The stump end of that big old beech tree.

If you look close to the left side you'll see a bit of burgundy. That's DH in a t-shirt about 3/4 of the way to the top of that beech tree.  It was huge in life.  In death it will be several weeks' worth of firewood.

That one was too big to cut into logs and put on the forks.  Instead, DH cut each chunk into firewood lengths and we stacked them into a couple of piles right there in the woods.  They'll age out there for about a year before being hauled in and split to use in the 2027/28 heating season.

We didn't just work all of Valentine's Day.  Well, actually, we did, because cooking counts as work in my book (it's a daily chore so that's work, right?  Not like going out to eat and being served. . . )  For dinner I made a big salad and baked potatoes while DH grilled a big ribeye steak (from the 1/4 beef we bought last fall).  We had ice cream for dessert.

Not Your Typical Hay Weather

 I will save you the diatribe on why?????? we were putting hay up in February, and just say that due to not getting a second cutting at this little place here last summer, and having a not great yield on first cutting, I had to buy hay.  Which is something I've never needed to do since moving to this little place here in 2003.  I bought some second cutting in September (off someone else's field) from the farmers who cut and bale my hay for me, but knew I would need to get somewhere in the range of 100-150ish more bales of first cutting (fed year round to the 'easy keeper' horses) to make it through to the 2026 hay crop was available.  

Due to several factors, I didn't buy hay in the Fall.  Or in December, or in January as I had wanted to. And now, in February I pretty much looked at DH and said "I have to get hay.  And I have to have your help putting it up.  So, how's this coming weekend look for you?"  And then I searched around, found acceptable hay about 15 miles away, went to look at it in person, approved it as something the horses at this little place here would/could eat, and made an appointment to pick it up Sunday after church.

85 bales of hay

Barring some issues with snow and ice--like the elevator being iced up (and subsequently breaking when DH insisted he knew the best way to remove the ice), I have to say a cold February day was probably the best/most comfortable weather we've experienced for putting hay into the loft!  Zero humidity!  Zero sweat!  Zero bugs!

K3 and Toad had been asked if they would like to earn some cash by coming over and helping get the hay stacked in the loft.  They both (surprisingly) agreed, and Rascal wanted to come too.  Rascal is still too small to be able to lift a hay bale, but we figured why not let him try if he was willing?  He did drag a few a short distance, 'helping' DH get them from the trailer and stacked onto a pallet that was then lifted (using the tractor forks) up to where they could be grabbed off from the loft with hay hooks.

DH & Rascal loading hay onto the pallet.

K3, Toad and I were up in the loft, to unload and stack the hay.  Mainly K3 unloaded, Toad drug the bales to me and I stacked them.  

Toad and K3 in the loft, watching the pallet of hay being lifted, ready to unload it.

(Yes, he's two years younger and now a hair taller than she is.)

Although after a while, K3 would hand them to me, I would drag them and Toad would stack.  I was pleasantly surprised by how useful he was (historically he hasn't been much for anything 'hard' physically).

With their help, it didn't take long at all to get all the newly purchased hay stored in the loft. 

Will it be enough to get the horses through 4+ more months?  I doubt it, I really doubt it (unless the Spring grass comes on early and thick).  But at least it's up and done for now.  I'll wrangle with DH for putting up another trailer load after a while, when the weather is not so freezing, when he's in a better mood (and hopefully has the hay elevator fixed).  On things I can't do by myself--and therefore need his help-- I have to pick my battles and choose the right timing.

Early February Randomness

 

Warm sunshine but a cold wind results in icicles curved at the tips like arthritic fingers.

Cleaning out closets, I found some grippy/pinch style infant sized clothing hangers that nobody (I offered them to) wanted.  So I carefully snapped the clips off the ends and now have four 'new' bag clips to replace some in the kitchen that had worn out in the last year or so.  I find this size especially great for using on veggie bags in the freezer (tater tots are veggies, right? 😉) where we don't use the entire bag at one time and need a way to securely close it for return to the freezer.

One night we had a lot of gusty wind that blew snow around for hours, hard packing it on top.  In the morning, in a spot where rabbits have been cavorting nightly all winter, I found these tracks without their usual softening of snow on the edges.  Somehow, this made the rabbits seem more fierce and scary rather than cute little critters leaving nice rounded tracks.

Funny little A-frame signs I found while out browsing a local antique/vintage and artisan shop.  Was very tempted to buy a few due to DH's habit of announcing to me (or texting me if I'm not indoors) every time the Yarn Thief throws up rather than just cleaning it up himself.  Very tempted.  But I decided to save my $5 for something else.

Like this vintage Breyer Running Stallion marked only $10!!  Not that I need more Breyers (there's several dozen packed away in the attic, I had quite a collection growing up), but it was only $10 and I always wanted the Running Stallion mold so. . . 

First day above freezing in about a month; horses definitely did not need their blankets on for warmth.  So everybody 'got naked' before getting turned out.  And first thing they all did once turned loose outside was drop down and roll around in the snow, scratching all their itches. (Crockett wears his fly mask on sunny days in the winter to protect his eye--that previously had cancer in the lid--from the brightness.  I call it his cheap sunglasses.)

During the Fall, my Mom had been given ten or so skeins of Zauberball Crazy sock yarn to "give to your daughter who knits socks", so she diligently passed them along to me.  Once I was done with Lucky's birthday sweater I grabbed a skein and starting knitting some (surprise) socks for my Mom.  I'm planning on giving them to her for Mother's Day.  I'm doing them in the Will O' The Wisp pattern and am about 3/4 done with the first one.

A lovely lady blue bird stopped in to say hi while I was eating lunch one afternoon.

House Deer?

 In late December, we started noticing deer up around the house from time to time.  We've always known they're out there, eating the garden, cleaning up dropped fruit in the orchard, traipsing through the side yard.  And having fawns in the pasture.

But typically they aren't found bedding down right near to the house like this one I spied as I was turning the living room lights out shortly after midnight on January 1st.

All of January, we spotted deer in or near the yard pretty much daily.  They would dig in the snow looking for grass underneath to eat.  They would bed down in the snow; sometimes in the open, sometimes under trees, sometimes right next to the house.

there were deer here in the night

front yard deer in the morning

front yard deer (bedded next to trees) in the evening

Yarn Thief looking intently at deer bedded outside the living room again

said deer, fluffed and frosty in the cold

deer digging in a flower bed next to the house

deer by the little log cabin (that we need to restore for the grandkids) in the side yard

deer in the back yard

They even left prints almost nightly in the new snow on the sidewalks and right behind our truck on the pad in front of the garage.  One morning, while going out to feed horses, I spooked a deer that had been hanging out down on our patio!  

Now, it has undoubtedly become a hard winter for them.  We don't usually have snow on the ground for weeks and weeks straight, let alone the string of below zero temperatures we had in January.  They are up in the yard, practically touching the house, looking for food and shelter.  The fir, pine and spruce trees we have on the perimeters of the yard are great for laying under.  The tips of those tree branches are tender enough to eat.  So is the arborvitae that is in the flower bed in front of the garage--they have denuded that poor arborvitae from ground to about five feet high.  

DH took mercy on them a week or so ago and plowed a path around the front, side, and back yards with the tractor in order to expose grass for them to eat so they wouldn't have to dig through the snow so much to find food. 

grazing the exposed grass

They really appreciated that, telling their friends.  For a few days, until the next 2-3" snowfall that covered the plowed area, we had not the 2-4 deer we had grown used to seeing, but 7 or 8 deer every time we looked outside.

DH and I have jokingly started calling them our house deer as they are getting used to us coming and going from the house and spook away less and less.  A lot of the time now they stand in the yard and watch us going about our work of feeding and turning out/bringing in horses, tending chickens, stoking the fire, shoveling snow.  We're not scary monsters, but weird beings to study.

This, however is not good.  Not good for deer to get too tame, too used to humans.  It's also not good for my garden, my flower beds, my fruit trees, my poor arborvitae that might have to be cut down later this year if it doesn't recover from being sheared by deer.  We're going to have to become scary again once the weather breaks.  Can't have deer eating all the landscaping or decimating the vegetables in the garden come summer.

Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #7

 Black rubber buckets!

These are, in my opinion, a lifesaver in the winter time.  Now, if you live in an environment that only gets below freezing for a few hours once in a great while, you can totally skip this one.  But if you live in a place where maintaining liquid drinking water for your horses is a royal pain in the winter months, read on!

Here's my totally unpaid endorsement for Fortiflex buckets like mine.

I don't care where you buy them.  Just make sure they are rubber and not plastic.  The plastic ones will definitely break when you smack them in cold weather; only the rubber ones are stomp-able. Read descriptions carefully when you are shopping online.

For years decades, I have been a strident believer in using black rubber buckets in the winter.  Now, I do have to say that since getting horses moved to this little place here, I use 'regular' plastic buckets in my stalls, even overnight.  But outside (since I don't have heated troughs yet) I use black rubber buckets.  Not plastic.  That's important: use rubber!

Why rubber?  Because you can curb stomp them to break out the ice!! Rubber buckets can be stomped and won't crack, split, or otherwise become leaky. This is why I use rubber buckets and not plastic ones for winter watering.  (They do wear out and start to get 'thready' and develop small leaks after years and years, but everything has a lifespan and stomping them for winters and winters and winters is better than whacking a plastic bucket the wrong way the first time it freezes and having it crack/shatter.) 

Iced over bucket

Turn it on it's side and give it a stomp, using your heel and pulling your foot back up as soon as you feel it make contact with the hard (iced over) part of the bucket. Turn and repeat as needed to break ice from around the bucket interior.  Dump loosened ice from bucket.

Same bucket as first picture, now empty.

Seriously, doing the bucket stomp is a learned art, but oh so very useful in the winter.  If you remove the ice before bringing the buckets in to thaw (loving my heated tack room for this purpose) there isn't so much thermal mass that you need to heat up!  Way more efficient.!

And if you don't have a handy dandy heated tack room, you can still do the bucket stomp on those black rubber suckers, get the ice out, and they will be ready for you to put fresh water into in the morning. Or to use in your stalls at night.  Several farms I worked at back before heated buckets became widely available used black rubber buckets in their stalls all winter long. Plus, there's zero fire hazard, zero accidental electrocution hazard (from horses getting ahold of the cord and biting/playing with it), and zero electric bill increase when you use a rubber bucket instead of a heated one.

Why black?  Because the sun is your friend on those colder than snake snot days, and black loves to absorb light and therefore heat.  Black will stay warmer longer than any other color.  And, honestly, I'm not sure these rubber buckets come in any other color.  

Last winter, and again this winter, I have also used my (empty) water troughs to hold my water filled buckets during turnout.  Putting the buckets down in the trough does a couple of things:

• It keeps them sheltered from the cold winds, thus delaying freezing.
• It holds them in a more natural drinking position that hanging them from the fence rails.
• It contains spills if your horse(s) play with them and slosh them.  All the water stays in the trough rather than going on the ground potentially creating a skating rink right where your horse stands to drink.

Another handy thing I have on hand for keeping these buckets drinkable in the winter is a nice sturdy tree root I found.  It's about the diameter of a broom handle, and has a nice bend in it.  I discovered it is perfect for sticking through the fence, into the buckets in the trough and swirling around to break up any ice that is forming. Or tap on a break any thin ice that has formed  That way I can do a mid-day check (and open) water without having to actually walk to and through the gates in order to reach the buckets.  Efficiency, LOL.