A Little Down Time

 DH and I slipped away for a quick vacation.

Although I'm not sure 'slipped away' is the right phrase.  Because it took talking to and arranging with several people in order to make it happen that I could be gone.  I feel 'plotted' would be a more apt word to use.

Anyway, we went on a Florida vacation without stepping foot in a theme park, and without hanging out at a poolside bar.  Kinda like going to Vegas and never entering a casino or seeing a show.  The resort was our homebase for sleeping, but when morning came we got the heck out of dodge and went to see things an hour or more away.

Because the point wasn't to go to Orlando and see the entertainment parks in Orlando.  The point was to take advantage of a sale on resort stays in Orlando, and direct flights to Orlando, and use those resources to make possible some exploring of central Florida. To get out of Michigan, to run away from life for a while, and to enjoy warm weather in a 'new' place.  (We've been to Orlando in the past, but always in the context of Disney, not as in the region around it).

Like Cocoa Beach, which was supposedly a good place to find shells.  Spoiler alert, it wasn't.  At least, not at all like what we'd expected.  I found a few decent ones, but I've been to other places in other states that had far more shells compared to sand on the beach.  Maybe its better at a different time of year.

While we decided not to don bathing suits and swim in the ocean as the water was rather chilly at knee deep, we did take off our sandals and walk through the surf for a mile plus, while watching for decent shells and seeing several different types of wading birds as well as pelicans. At ankle deep or less, the water was pleasingly warm, except for a rogue cold wave or two.  

Wading barefoot is definitely a task you can't do on the shores of the Great Lakes here in Michigan in early March; a lot of those are still covered in ice this time of year.  So, being able to do so in Florida was a nice treat even if the shells were kind of lacking.

a willet I (barely) managed to catch a non-blurry picture of

With the exception of traffic around Orlando, which was a snarl that took forever, it seemed, it was a relaxing day.  We saw alligators on ditch banks, lots of cattle grazing, and did a quick side trip over to Cape Canaveral but decided neither one of us was interesting in going in the Kennedy Space Center enough to pay for parking plus admission when the day was half over.  Instead, we watched flamingos flying, which was rather trippy to see big pink birds in the sky, and saw a wild boar browsing along the side of a road.

The next day began with a hunt for a good doughnut for breakfast.  I rarely eat doughnuts anymore, since they are too much carb for too little breakfast ever since I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 2017 (2018? I don't remember), but I had planned ahead and before we left the resort I ate protein in the form of plain Greek Yogurt and was then theoretically ready to blow my carb allowance on a long John style doughnut. A careful vacation splurge, if you will.

Except a long John turned out to be an elusive thing to find.  With Dunkin shops all over the place, it was very disappointing to walk in a few locations and see pretty much only circle doughnuts with holes. And even the filled circles didn't have custard inside or chocolate frosting on top, being jelly filled and coated in powdered sugar.  Nope.  Not good enough for me.

(Side note, since it's been years since I was last in a Dunkin shop: do they even make long Johns anymore?  Or was this lack just a regional thing?) 

We looked up doughnut places online, tried, by their pictures, to determine which ones actually made long John doughnuts, and finally hit upon one that looked promising.  DH typed it in to the navigation system on our rental car and off we went on a (doughnut) treasure hunt.  Which took us to the gate of Universal Studios.  Yeah, the doughnut shop was in the theme park.  Not going there.  

With dropping blood sugar and resignation that I really needed to eat some carbs ASAP, I had DH stop at a grocery store where we also found no filled doughnuts. I did score a large container of fresh fruit, enough to cover my breakfast carb requirement.  So I had strawberries, blueberries and grapes for breakfast and DH found an Einstein Bros bagel nearby for himself.

Our second planned fun thing for that day was to go kayaking.  We headed through the (horrendous) Orlando area traffic over to Kings Landing in the Wekiva River Basin, where we rented a couple of kayaks and went out paddling for a few hours.  

We saw many kinds of fish, enjoyed floating down the beautiful clear water, and even saw an alligator on the bank of the river.  Ironically I paddled right past it, less than 2' from where it was in some brush, and wasn't even aware of it's presence until a minute later when someone in a kayak behind me said "There's an alligator!"

Of course I had to turn around, paddle up river, and go looking for it! DH, curious but more cautious than I, turned around and came too, staying behind me (so the alligator would eat me first and leave him alone?) We stayed close to the opposite bank this time, and DH managed to get a picture or two although they came out a bit blurry.

That black bumpy thing isn't an old tire, it's a gator!

After our kayak excursion, before getting close enough to Orlando to join the traffic, we stopped at a gas station to use the restrooms and guess what I found!  Not exactly a custard filled long John with chocolate frosting, but the gas station did have a doughnut case with creme filled chocolate frosted doughnuts!  

So we bought two of those, one for me and one for DH and called it lunch.  They were (surprisingly) excellent doughnuts.  Circle K for the win!  Who would have ever thought a gas station would have a great doughnut when several doughnut shops did not.

Our final day of vacation, we drove over to Ocala, heading for the World Equestrian Center.  DH had taken it upon himself to look up the WEC online several weeks before our trip, and had seen that there was supposed to be a dressage show series starting the last day of our trip.  So our plan was to drive over and spectate some Grand Prix level dressage.

As it turned out, that was the first day of the show series, but it was not a show day.  It was a schooling day.  Which was not as exciting, but I still enjoyed watching many horses being worked.  There's not a lot of opportunity around this little place here to sit and watch riders practice piaffe, passage, canter pirouettes and zigzags, let alone doing one tempis!

I took several videos, but apparently forgot to get pictures of the cool stuff, lol.  Here's a picture of one of the riders who I most liked how he rode (quietly in the saddle and without being harsh to the horse) while he was finishing their session at a walk.

Although there were no dressage classes scheduled for that day, on other parts of the WEC grounds there were multiple jumping competitions going on.  We first watched a Young Riders (Under25) class, then headed to the main arena where we saw a few riders in a jump off round of a 1.45 meter class (where the height of the jump is about 4' 9").  That was very interesting, especially for DH who doesn't get as much joy as I do from the nuances of watching dressage.

Along with three days of interesting-to-us activities, we experienced some really good food.  Unlike most other vacations we've had, where we utilize the kitchen in our suite--and the grill(s) provided by the resort--I did zero cooking this time.  That was one of my stipulations when this vacation idea first came up: that if I was 'getting away from real life' for a bit, that had to include me not planning, shopping for, cooking, or cleaning up after any meals. I've been rather burned out on that aspect of my life for a few months now.

Instead, we made a list of cuisines we'd like to eat while we were there.  Did we find all of them?  No, our list was quite a bit longer than the number of meals we had in three days.  The main goal was to try something different than our usual.  So, preferably no pizza, no pasta, no major chains (local chains OK). . .

We had some incredible Cuban food, (my pechuga de pollo plancha with salad, fried plantains and Spanish rice is show below), awesome Turkish kebab, and discovered a breakfast place (a chain, turned out) that was so good we ate there two out of three mornings.  

delicious Cuban dinner

breakfast hash with goat cheese (minus eggs since I don't eat commercial eggs)

This was just the break from my real life that I needed.  I have to say it was the most relaxing vacation I've had in many years.  And even though we ate out a lot, the food wasn't horribly pricey despite being a tourist area with the expected price hikes.  In fact, $40 seemed to be the theme for dinner cost; two of us and no matter where we went and what we ordered, the tab was always $40.  That's not any more expensive than dinner out in our home area.

A Gnome-icide

At the end of February, we lost all our snow.  The last of the drifts and snow piles melted.  I took a little time to walk around and assess the flowerbeds. (Confession, I was looking to see if any of my crocuses were up yet.  They weren't).

While I saw only the teeniest of tips on the daffodils sprouting on the south side of the house, there were no other flowers waking up yet.  

Walking around to the front side of the house, I was startled to come upon a crime scene.  It appears that over the winter there had been a gnome-icide!!  Mr. and Mrs. Garden Gnome were lying face down in the flowerbed that is to the north of my front steps, and Mr. Garden Gnome had been smashed to bits!

At first I was afraid it was a double gnome-icide, but as I carefully lifted Mrs. Garden Gnome off the remains of her husband I could see that she had been prostrate with grief but otherwise unharmed.

Mr. Garden Gnome, however, was definitely a goner, and looked like he'd been departed for quite some time.  I'm pretty sure they had been covered over in a snow drift for many weeks prior to our weather warming up.  So at this point, there was no evidence of who had perpetrated this heinous crime. 

Even a sunnier day turned up no clues.  Was it the house deer that ate the arborvitae further down the flowerbed during the coldest part of the winter?  Did one of them, digging in the snow for plant matter to eat from the flowerbed, stomp Mr. Garden Gnome to death accidentally?  The snow had melted away and there were no telling deer prints found.

Or perhaps a delivery person carrying a package to the porch trudged through the drifted snow and thought they were on the sidewalk but really they were in my flowerbed and stepped onto a blown-over and buried in a drift Mr. Garden Gnome, crushing him with their human weight?  

This theory has been discarded since no packages were delivered to the front porch during the really cold and snowy weeks, all delivery drivers propped packages up against the garage doors where the approach had been plowed clear.

Or, (given the state I found this couple in with Mrs. Garden Gnome grieving over her poor mutilated  husband this one might be the true answer,) had Mr. Garden Gnome developed a small crack (or many small cracks) last fall into which water seeped.  And then when our super frigid January came had that moisture frozen, expanding in the process, and blown him apart? 

Or, maybe he had fallen over earlier in the winter, taken on water which later froze, then a stiff wind during a snowstorm blew Mrs. Garden Gnome into him and her touch was the kiss of death, with just enough force to undo him?

We may never know.

Unless Mrs. Garden Gnome shows up this spring with a new paint job and is found cavorting around the flower beds like a merry widow.

Books Read in 2026: February

 1. The Leisure Seeker by Michael Zadoorian.  This is another book I picked up at a book swap.  Elderly couple goes on a cross country road trip.  Did I like it?  Yes.  Some parts were funny, some were eerily relatable (as DH and I have been together 35 years now), some were not my moral value but even so I could empathize.

2. River of Life by Kathleen Y'Barbo. Yet another book swap book.  I tell you, if you hear of a swap in your area, go check it out!  Although I confess this was a Did Not Finish for me.  I gave it about 60 pages, wasn't getting into it at all (honestly was kind of turned off by how very similar the story line was to another book, by a different author, that I also Did Not Finish last year).  Maybe I don't like the modern cozy mystery genre?  Growing up, I was reading Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle by 8th grade, so maybe that set my standard for mystery stories on a different plane?

3. Snowed In by Catherine Walsh.  A romance novel, and, except for a little explicit near the end, one that I liked. It's an engaging, quick, light read with some humor added in.  I will most likely look up more books from this author to read in the future.

4. The Maze by Lucy Rees. This is another book I picked up at last fall's book swap because the cover blurb looked like it might be interesting. I started this one while waiting for a requested library book that was in transit.  Honestly, I put it down once that awaited book was available to read and haven't picked it back up again.  Interesting?  A little bit, because it involves horses and Arizona. The characters I'm not so much connecting with, but the environment and mode of transportation (horseback) I am.  Will probably read it here and there between library books.

5. Heartwood by Amity Gaige.  Hmm.  What to say about this one?  It was weird.  Overall good and interesting.  It wove together, through one based-on-real-life event, the stories of three moms and daughters, with a touch of a couple other somewhat major characters.  Will I read more by this author?  I'm not sure.

6. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.  Very tiny print, at least in the edition I got from the library, and slow starting.  I kept slogging through because of the time period was of interest, and I wanted to see what made this a Classic.  It did get more interesting as it went on.  Now that I've wrapped it up, I think I'm in the mood for a light, modern (but not too explicit if romance-y) read.

Make My Horse Life Easier Tip #8

I thought I would do a post on how I use up hay chaff from the loft during the winter rather than letting it accumulate and get moldy.  How often I do this really depends on the hay itself; some hays are more prone to producing chaff when the bales are moved around than others.  In general, I'd say once every six weeks or so I have enough chaff to fill a muck bucket (which, packed, is roughly equivalent to one flake of hay) and make the effort worthwhile.

My barn is a monitor-style, which means it has a two story center section, where the loft is located, and wings on both long sides that contain the stalls.  The sides of the loft are open to the stalls below.  On a barn where the loft floor does not open to the stalls below, this method of mine won't work (although you could open the loft door that goes to the outside and do the hauling up and down portion that way).

First, I rake all the chaff in a pile up in the loft.  I usually do this on a day when I've throw down hay for restocking the feed room.  There is an old metal-tined manure fork (circa 1980s) kept in the loft expressly for this purpose.

Back on the main floor of the barn, I grab a muck bucket (clean, of course), and thread a longe line through both handles, then clip it to itself.

Once that's done, I take the muck bucket (and looped up longe line) to the stall I'm going to put the chaff in, and I toss the longe line up into the loft.

Having done this, I go climb the ladder to the loft, and walk to where the longe line landed.

I use the longe line to haul the muck bucket up to the loft (it's too big to go up the ladder and through the hole in the loft floor where the ladder resides).

Loosening the line by sliding the clip along it, I pull it out of the way so that the opening in the muck bucket is unobstructed.

Then I fill it with hay chaff.  One nicely packed muck bucket of chaff is roughly equivalent to one decent sized flake of hay.  Good to know so you can accordingly reduce what you give that night at feeding time.

I adjust the longe line back over the top of the muck bucket, then using the line, lower in down into the stall below.

Once the muck bucket has reached the stall floor, I climb down the ladder out of the loft, and go dump the bucket in the corner where hay goes at feeding time.

.

This system does require a bit of climbing up and down the ladder, depending on how many buckets-worth of chaff is in the loft at the time.  But, I figure it has lots of benefits:

1. Good exercise!
2. Can be done on even a windy day (compared to tossing the chaff out the loft door to the ground below, then raking up and putting in the bucket for carrying to stalls).  Ditto rainy day.  Ditto snowy day.  Ditto day with horrendously muddy ground.
3. The chaff gets fed rather than piled up and allowed to mold for a once a year loft clean out just before putting in the new season's hay harvest.  So, more efficient use of hay/feed.
4. Since there's no mouldering chaff pile, the air quality in the barn is better.

I Just Want It Out of My House

 DH and I have lived at this little place here for not quite 22.5 years.  When we moved in, we had four kids.  At the time, we thought, coming from a house just around 1200 sq ft to this house with two stories and a basement totaling about 2700 sq ft, that we had a lot of stuff. 

I mean, it was six people's worth, right? Our old house had felt like it was bursting at the seams. And while it didn't fill our new house, it fit comfortably, but it still seemed like a lot.

Fast forward through four teenagers who accumulated more stuff, then four 'kids' that moved out and, except for one, moved back in again at least once, each of them bringing more stuff and sometimes more people and those people's stuff.  Not to mention the things DH and I accumulated over time: homesteading things, hobby things, crafting things. . . things we inherited when our grandmothers passed away. . .things for our grandchildren to sit in, eat on,  play with. . . things our own mothers have given to us from their own cleaning outs or helping to distribute usable goods of friends who have passed on from this world.

We did, over the course of 22 years, get rid of stuff we didn't think we needed to hold on to. Things that just didn't fit, or we already owned two of, or, honestly were not our taste. Yet, at this point, in 2026, my house is stuffed.  

Too stuffed.  Smotheringly stuffed.  I Hate It stuffed. Off and on, in the last five years, DH and I have tried to pare down what's here.  Kids who bought their first homes were told "Come get your stuff!" and, they did, for the most part, come look through what was left, take what they wanted, threw away what was unwanted/unneeded and unappealing to a second owner due to age or condition, and said "give away the rest".  

'The rest', is part of the issue here.  By leaving 'the rest', they passed on--to me-- responsibility for locating and transporting to it's proper passing on place.  There's also my own and DH's own stuff that is pass-on-able, that needs the same treatment: where to pass it on to?  How and when to get it there?

Some of it, I used to give away to various charities.  But in the last ten years or so, it seems that charities have gotten pickier about what they will accept.  You'd think a womens shelter would want clothing and bedding and towels. . . Around here, not so much.  They want those things only if brand new, not if used, and even more than brand new they'd rather just have cash.

Same with furniture, household, and children's items.  There are less places around me to give them to compared to a decade (or two) ago.  Yes, there's online give it away options, but I've found that posting things on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace these days is a real pain in the arse.  People want them, yes, but it takes time to weed through the replies, set up a day and time for pick up and then have the person no-show, so on to the next person who showed interest and start the whole process over again.

For big things, like some dressers I got rid of last summer (why have eight??? dressers in a house where only two people live?) I went through that frustrating rigamorole.  But there's such a volume of smaller things that it would be a full time job taking photos of and making postings for items then screening responses and arranging pick up appointments with people.

I just want it out of my house.  I don't want to have to clone myself in order to have time to do all my normal daily tasks plus deal with the rehoming of goods.  Honestly, there's some days I look at the piles and totes and stuffed closets and wish I had lower ethical standards and could just get a dumpster and spend a few hours tossing everything in, then happily wave goodbye when the trash company came and hauled the dumpster away.

But I can't.  Because I'm too frugal, too environmentally conscious, too aware that there are people out there, somewhere, who would love to have this stuff  perhaps even need some of it and can't afford to buy it from the second hand shops (like Goodwill, where we used to donate all our used but still usable clothes and housewares to).

I'm toying with the idea of having a 'free' sale this summer.  Although that's all the work of a garage sale with zero of the profits.  And, living in the boonies, garage sales around this little place here really don't draw a big enough attendance to solve the problem of getting rid of useful items we don't want/need anymore which was the whole reason to have a garage sale in the first place.

Earlier this winter, I did donate a large bag of coats and a second large bag of nice ladies clothing to the local food and clothing bank.  It didn't make a dent in the amount of things still here that would be perfectly useful to someone else.  I have several bags of bedding, towels, and old sweatshirts that animal rescues are happy to have.  Problem is, those animal rescues are all at least a half-hour drive from here, in directions that neither DH nor I have a reason to go in hardly ever.  And that's the moral dilemma again:

Trash?  It would be so much easier time-wise and in cost (gas, wear and tear on the vehicle used).  We hardly ever even half-fill our trash bin that gets picked up weekly, I could, over time throw away all these things without it costing more for trash removal.  But I know every item is a useful thing, and doesn't belong in a landfill yet.  Oh, the guilt of the thought of throwing it away rather than taking an hour or more of time, plus making an appointment for a specific day and time (and arranging my schedule around it) to drive it to a place that would make use of it.

Donate?  Where?  And when will I be in that area without a special trip and several hours devoted to just that?  This right here is the main reason I still have so much stuff that just needs to get out of my house.

I just want it out.

A Few of My Favorite Things

 Flannel sheets. Oh so cozy!

Sunshiny days in the winter just make me want to be outside all day!

Extended child's pose in yoga and corpse pose in yoga especially after a good flow workout.  Really, I love yoga in general for keeping limber.

Thunderstorms.  In an alternate universe I can totally see myself as a career storm chaser.

Rainbows after thunderstorms

Warm cookies fresh from the oven.  Ditto warm fresh bread.

The 2025 Vintage Wine

 I don't remember if I actually did a post last fall about DH starting a batch of wine from our Concord grapes.  I suspect I had planned to, and took some pictures intending to, but never got around to actually doing so.  Anyhow. . . 

We had a good crop of grapes last September.  DS2 came and picked almost two bushel so that he could make some wine.  And then DH and I picked another bushel-ish a week or so later (it was a busy time) when the grapes were almost to the overripe stage because after DS2 started his wine, DH decided he wanted to make some afterall.

For the first couple of weeks, I took a picture of the carboy the wine was fermenting in almost daily--I told you I had intended to make a blog post about it.  My thought was to capture the day to day little changes in color, clarity and the process the grape must goes through on the way to becoming a ready to drink wine (which takes months).  And then came deer hunting season and the holiday season and the winter weather of January. . .

day 1

day 2

day 3

day 5?

day 8?

day 10ish

two weeks?

All these months, the carboy sat on the kitchen counter in the same spot DH had set it back in September.  He never did move it down to the basement so it could continue the process in darkness, which is highly recommended.  Nope, it sat on the counter exposed to sunlight and fluctuating temperatures.  For an engineer and a (home) brewer, sometimes his lack of adherence to proper lab procedure gives me fits.  But, really, wine is a pretty easy thing to make; it's hard to ruin it.  You either get wine, good wine, or great wine; you have to be pretty neglectful of cleanliness to get bad wine.  This was clean, just not environmentally controlled.

This weekend he finally got around to racking it from the carboy (which is usually done after the first month, to get the wine out of the sediment for better clarity and flavor).  He was going to do it near the end of January, but couldn't find the tubing that fits onto his racking cane.  Then, he found the tubing, but it was pretty gross looking (old, probably not cleaned out the best last time it was used) and he threw it into the trash.  Then he had a hard time finding tubing locally in the size he needed.  But now he finally had new clean tubing of the right size, so the wine was removed from the carboy to the bottling bucket.  

And from there he put it directly into wine bottles and corked them.  Now the wine has been moved to the basement, where it's dark and the temperature doesn't fluctuate with how sunny the day is.

carboy containing only sediment-y dregs of wine

a crateful of wine

There wasn't quite enough wine to fill the final bottle, so that got poured into a couple of juice glasses for sampling. 

On first taste, it had a sorta tangy overtone that went away once you swallowed.  But once the wine had been allowed to sit and 'breathe' for a few minutes, that weird tang had gone.  It's not the bestest wine ever, but certainly not bad.  I will say it has a totally different body and flavor compared to DH's first batch of  wine from our grapes in 2023.