Merlin - Small Falcon with Prey

We've been seeing this fellow/lady on our morning dog walks for most of this summer.  It was a frequent resident of the park that we walked through and was always quite noisy and boisterous.  This is a merlin, a small falcon commonly known as a pigeon hawk.  You can see in the pictures below where that name comes from. 

The other day I noticed that the merlin was standing in the street outside the house and it looked like he/she had snagged some lunch.  An unfortunate dove was grabbed. 

We don't relish seeing birds get eaten, but it is fascinating to see the web of life in and around our small little homestead.  The merlin was a very good looking bird, striking blue and gray wings with mottled white and brown undercarriage. 

A Classic Shadowfax Photo from Days of Yore

This is an older photo - back from 2010, just months after we had gotten Shadowfax. Shadowfax might be a powerful and mighty deaf pittie, but she sure knew (and still knows) how to look like a giant goofy goober.

I laugh every time that I see this photo, what a derp-tacular face.  And we're thankful that the rest of her grew into those gigantic paws and gangly legs. Sadly, it has been five years since this photo and (unsurprisingly) her braided rope toy has passed on to the other side.  We now need the Extra Large Super Jumbo 6 foot rope toy for adequate tug-of-war and chomping. 

Containers and Front Step Plantings

The front step area of our house was a bit of a mystery to me for a few years, I was never quite sure what to do with it.  I was new to the area and learning about which plants did/didn't grow in Zone 4, and our front steps faced to the North.  Adding seasonal plants to the steps was always seemingly on my to-do list, but never really a top priority.  Once I was done with other more critical matters like the garden, planting fruit trees, and planting pretty flowers, it was time to think about how to spruce up the front steps.

These are the front steps of the homestead.  They're pretty plain concrete steps with a black wrought iron hand railing on either side.  They get a bit of indirect light in early morning and late afternoon, but that's about it. 

This pot has "Sliver Falls" dichondra, "Big Red Judy" coleus, and begonias (the name escapes me).  I was dividing hostas along the front walk (more on this in another post) and ran out of not only places to put the extra hosta divisions, but space in the trash can as well.  So I decided to throw a half dozen of them in plastic pots to see if they lived.  They did.  This continues to prove my theory that you can't kill hostas.

The hostas provide some nice variegated foliage to soften the front steps and augment the plantings in the pot.  I'm not one for paying big money for pots, this is one of four that we received as a gift from our generous In-Laws.  They snatched them up pretty cheaply when a local hardware store was going out of business. 

I planted another pot that's located to the right of the porch, in the midst of "snow on the mountain" ground cover that has taken over the area.  This pot has "Red Star" dracena, coleus (not sure of the name), and impatiens.

How about you?  Does your garden plan include planting in pots?  What do you do to liven up the look of your front/back porch?

Shadowfax Having a Nap

It's a warm and muggy summer day here at the homestead in North Dakota.  The pups are napping up in expectation of a visit from Grandma and Grandpa.

You can never be too rested in preparation for a visit from the grandparents.

Homemade Sauerkraut Recipe and Instructions

It's sauerkraut season here in North Dakota.  We forgot to plant cabbages in the garden this year, but that's OK since cabbages are cheap and plentiful at the local Farmer's Market.  Let's make some kraut! This is truly one of the easiest dishes to make, you know, assuming you like sauerkraut and all.  Little more than cabbages, salt, a crock, and a couple of hours of elbow grease will have you up to your chin in kraut for months. 

This is a three gallon ceramic crock for fermenting the sauerkraut along with one of the two cabbages I purchased at the Farmer's Market in town.  The cabbage weighs about 4 pounds and cost me $3.  So for $6 and the cost of salt, I'm gonna have months of delicious chock-full-of-probiotics sauerkraut.

If you don't have a crock already, these are pretty easy to come by here in the Upper Midwest. Our In-Laws picked this up at a garage sale for $5 (I think) and gave it to us.  If you don't have access to used crocks like this, you may have to get one from Amazon or elsewhere online.  They're not too expensive and last for a long time.  And sauerkraut can also be made in any non-reactive container, like a glass jar. 

The key to sauerkraut is finely slicing the cabbage, about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, and try for consistency.  We have a mandolin slicer, but the cabbage was too unwieldy and I just wound up cutting it by hand.

After you've finely sliced the cabbage, you're going to want to physically damage the leaves in order to coax out the cabbage juices that will ferment the cabbage into sauerkraut.  You're going to do this by beating the heck out of the cabbage.  My tool of choice is an old-school hand potato masher.

I did one round of squishing the cabbage (in the white plastic bowl in the picture above) and continued mashing them in the crock.  It helps at this point of the process to angrily yell "HULK SMASH!", or something of the sort.  Not only will this help your sauerkraut taste better, but it will also likely have the added benefit of forcing your significant other to shout "What the hell is going on in there?!?!" from the other room.

At this stage you're going to add salt to your cabbage mixture.  The general rule is 1.5 to 2 teaspoons of salt per pound of cabbage mixture.  You want the mixture to taste like you've added salt, but not oppressively salty.  After an hour or so after you've started smashing and adding salt, you should notice a decent amount of liquid in the crock. 

Continue with your potato masher and press the cabbage mixture to the bottom.  Your goal is to get every last bit of cabbage underneath the surface of the liquid.  I then took a plate and set it on top of the cabbage mixture in the crock, then added this one gallon jar filled with water to weigh it down to push the cabbage below the liquid.  The plate is turquoise colored, thus the odd bluish hue.

Again, the goal is to keep the cabbage mixture below the surface of the liquid.  Most people use a plate or a bowl and then have a weight on top to push the cabbage down and make sure the liquid remains above the cabbage. 

This is the ghost on our kitchen counter.  The crock is going to sit here at room temperature for 2-3 days, then I'll take it down to the basement where it's a little cooler.  I'll check it in a week, and weekly thereafter.  Usually at the three week mark, it has the right level of spicy/sour/crunchy for my taste.  You may want more or less fermentation time depending on the temperature and your personal taste preference. 

Once the sauerkraut is to your liking, you have a decision to make.  You have the option of canning it, which will make it shelf safe, but also eliminate most/all of the good probiotic bacteria, or you can store it in the refrigerator.  The sauerkraut will continue to ferment in the refrigerator, but at a much slower rate.  I store it in the refrigerator in a one gallon glass jar, and it's usually good for several months.

That's how you make sauerkraut.  A minimal investment for the cost of the cabbage, and few hours of work and you've got months of kraut for side dishes and toppings.  What about you awesome reader?  Do you make sauerkraut?  Do you pickle or ferment anything else?  

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Deaf Dogs on Squirrel and Rabbit Patrol

The squirrel and rabbit vigil never stops around here.  Whatever vantage point is available, it is generally used to guard against the ceaseless squirrel onslaught, and to a lesser extent, the bunny menace.

Shadowfax spent half the day today on her front porch lookout post, patrolling the area for any manner of varmint.

Once the varmint was spotted, a proper barking spasm (this one of her few offensive weapons) ensued. Tearing around the house and yard barking eventually led her back to her perch at a high rate of speed and she knocked the pillow off. We probably replace that pillow a dozen times a day.  

Shaak Ti is probably more anti-squirrel/bunny than Shadowfax, but her efforts are more focused when she's outside, usually on our walks.  Every once in a while she'll patrol from an indoor perch, but for the most part she yields the indoor security functions to Shadowfax. 

It's hot out, why not snuggle?

While Shaak Ti isn't big on snuggling with Shadowfax, for some reason she consented to it this afternoon even though it's pretty warm out.

Hope you have someone or something to snuggle with today. 

Shaak Ti on the Couch

We could probably have our own dedicated "Shaak Ti is Strange" section of this blog.  While there are plenty of examples to pick from, creating yet another page seems like a lot of work.  We'll have to settle for regular photos of Shaak Ti being the odd little deaf dog that she is.

The more squished the better.  Due to my allergies and other reasons, we don't allow the dogs on the furniture in the house.  This is my old couch that we moved to the covered front porch, so it's now not an inside couch, and is a very special exception to the "no dogs on the furniture" rule. 

What a perfect spot for napping.  Shaak Ti loves nothing more than wedging into a nice cozy spot and having a nap.  The fact that it's 80 degrees out doesn't bother her a bit. 

Luckily this doesn't prevent Alycia from getting any work done, she soldiers on bravely with her computing. 

Apple Tree Lost to the Wind

Earlier this week we had some strong thunderstorms roll through the area.  There wasn't a tornado or anything, but some very strong straight-line winds brought a few tree limbs down.  The storm didn't last long, about an hour, but there was a decent amount of storm related carnage in our yard and throughout the neighborhood.

One of our apple trees was snapped off right at the base.  The winds that came through were in the 50 to 60 miles per hour range, pretty significant winds.  This was a Honeycrisp Apple that was in its' fourth year and was just starting to produce apples, so it was a big bummer for me.

The good news is that this is not a grafted tree, so the shoots that come up should be true Honeycrisp Apple shoots, and should (eventually and in theory) become a regular tree again and produce apples.

So I'll throw out some questions to you knowledgeable readers:  Is it worth the 3-4 years it will take for this to grow back, or should I just replace the tree?  As a non-grafted apple tree, can a sucker grow up, be trained into a main leader and indeed eventually produce apples? 

Clematis Blooms and Garden Helpers

After three years, our clematis vines are finally blooming.  We have three of them; one is blooming profusely, one is blooming a little, and one is lagging.  I really like clematis and would enjoy getting even more of them, but I want to experiment with the locations that we have now to see what works in our yard. 

This is the clematis jackmanii, which is planted on the east side of the house, near our blueberry area.  It gets sun light until early afternoon and is on our visual path as we walk into the house.  It's a really pleasant pick-me-up to see the lovely purple blooms when we walk into the back door. 

Our garden helpers are always out with us in the yard "helping".  And by helping I mean getting in the way at every available opportunity and sticking their noses into the dirt.  Shaak Ti has a tendency to stand right where you want to pull weeds. 

Shadowfax inspects the new metal butterfly garden sculpture we received from Alycia's parents.  They purchased two of them at a recent Gardening Day event here in town and placed them superstitiously in our backyard while we were on vacation.  They're sneaky like that. 

The Puffins and Other Birds in Newfoundland, Canada

This is our last post in a three part series with pictures and stories from our trip to Newfoundland, Candaa.  You've already ready had the pleasure of seeing the incredible sights of the City of St John's, Newfoundland and some of the National Parks and other cool stuff.  Now we're going to don our bird nerd caps and show some pictures of the birds we saw in Newfoundland. 

On our hike around Signal Hill we saw signs indicating that it was a bald eagle nesting area, and after coming to a small clearing, we saw the nest below.  We see bald eagles regularly in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and we've seen a nest before.  But we've never seen a bald eagle nest from above, let alone with two chicks in it.  It was a very unusual vantage that was pretty darn cool. 

We drove to Elliston, "The Root Cellar Capital of the World", not just for the root cellars, but also for the puffins.  There was supposed to be a puffin viewing area.  This sweet puffin painted pawn chair marked the spot of the puffin viewing area. 

The puffin viewing area was a hike to a narrow grassy cliff, and across a small chasm was the large rock that the puffins were nesting on.  There were a good number of puffins, but also some gulls, kittiewakes, and a few black guillemots.

Puffins nest on large rocks that are separated from the mainland so as to avoid land predators like foxes.  But they also create burrows a few feet underground to lay their eggs, so they need a large rock with some topsoil on top of for nesting, it's a pretty specific set of site requirements.

National Parks and Cool Stuff in Newfoundland, Canada

If you missed the first installment of pictures and stories from St. John's, Newfoundland, you can find part one here.  Alycia and I arrived in Newfoundland and had a few days before her conference started, so we ventured out to see as much of the island as we could. 

We took a day trip to see the next peninsula to the West over from St. John's, which included the town of Elliston, the self-proclaimed "Root Cellar Capital of the World".  Here John poses with one of the root cellars, many of which looked to have been used for many years.  To their credit, yes there were a lot of root cellars, but I'm not sure that slogan is going to attract hordes of tourists. 

This is a fish flake, a traditional wooden stand used for drying and preserving fish.  They aren't used much anymore in modern times, but some some fish flakes in the small towns and hamlets were left intact to demonstrate how fishing was conducted for generations in Newfoundland

Alycia is posing here on the road to Bonavista, where John Cabot is supposed to have first landed in North America.  If you look closely on the horizon you can see white specks floating on the water.  These are icebergs!  They calve off glaciers in Greenland and can take years to work their way down the Eastern Coast of Newfoundland into Iceberg Alley (along the Eastern Coast of Canada and the US) before eventually melting. 

The City of St. John's - Newfoundland, Canada

Alycia recently had an academic conference to attend in St. John's, Newfoundland.  I tagged along, because when are you ever going to have a reason to go to a place like Newfoundland?  St. John's is a town of about 200,000, situated alongside a working harbor, and has a pretty interesting and vibrant downtown.

This was the view from our hotel room, the harbor to the left and downtown to the right. It was quite a lovely view and we enjoyed the salty sea air as it breezed into our room. St. John's claims to be the oldest city on North America and this harbor has been used as a shipping and fishing port for many hundreds of years. 

The road alongside our hotel went straight up to Signal Hill.  This is the view of the harbor and city of St. John's from Signal Hill, and the ocean is directly behind us.  Signal Hill was the site of British, then French, then British forts throughout the years and was the also the site of a battery of cannons that guarded the entrance to the harbor.  Signal Hill is also the site where Guglielmo Marconi received the first Trans-Atlantic wireless radio signal from England in 1901.

Your next fun fact about Newfoundland (and Labrador in this case) is that it is the origination of both the Newfoundland and Labrador dogs.  There are statues in the city commemorating these dogs, which both were originally bred as working dogs to help fishermen.  It's possible that the Lab or Retriever that's sitting near your feet, snoozing away, is descended from the line of working dogs originally bred here in Newfoundland. 

Snuggle Time

Snuggle time is important.  Even in the summer when it's warm outside, it's never too warm for some snuggling.

Alycia also wanted to make sure you notice her super-sweet house clothing, aka the lime on lime outfit that she's rocking in this picture. 

Deaf Dog Pic of the Day

This is Shadowfax.  No other words are necessary as this one photo perfectly sums up her entire essence. 

The Bear Family Travels South

My friend that I have known since second grade, Stacey, got married in Auburn, AL last month. She married a very nice Italian fellow named Antonio. John opted to stay home. He said that driving through the Deep South in a rental car with the Bear Family was a nightmare of his.  (John here - Yes, I've actually had a very visceral and horrific dream about being stuck wandering through the South, confined in a rental car with Alycia and her family.  It was a terrifying dream.)

My parents played multiple roles in the ceremony: my dad escorted Stacey down the aisle, and my mom found readings for my dad to present, as well as hemming the suit for Stacey's adorable son, Jonathan.

Below, they're with Stacey's department chair who officiated the ceremony. 

Along with going to the wedding, my parents and I had a little bit of time to do some sightseeing. Stacey had suggested going to the Little White House in Warm Springs, GA so we stopped by on our way to Auburn from Atlanta. As you can read from the sign, FDR came to Warm Springs to seek relief from the polio that affected his legs.

The presidential compound was actually very small. The president's cabin was in the middle (with bedrooms for the president, the first lady, and his personal secretary), with a guest house on one side (with 2 single beds in it) and servants' quarters on the other (with 2 bedrooms). It was very quiet and peaceful there. Basically the only indication that it was a retreat for a president were the sentry posts spread out in the woods around the house.

Shaak Ti's Sweater

After a successful sweater venture with Shadowfax, my mom decided that Shaak Ti needed a sweater too. After all you can't have one of the grand-dogs running around with a sweater and one go sweaterless.  Here are the photos from her first sweater fitting.

Shadowfax was a little bit jealous that she wasn't getting the same level of attention as Shaak Ti.  We tried to explain that she already had her sweater experience, but she wanted no part of the explanation. 

A sweater fitting can turn into a tummy rub session at the drop of a hat.  I can personally vouch for this fact.  

Grandma takes some measurements to make sure that it fits nice and tight on Shaak Ti's tummy. 

One person measures, one person gives Shaak Ti pets. 

Poor Shadowfax sits and waits for her turn for attention. 

Tito hangs out in his bed and is a shining beacon of indifference...and anger.  This is his "I frickin' dare you to try to put a damn sweater on me."

Grandpa can't help much on the sweater knitting front, but he's always available to give lots of pets. 

All this attention is making her sleepy.

While my mom loves all of our dogs, Shaak Ti is her favorite. Here they're having a nice talk, which ended with Shaak Ti giving grandma a kiss. 

Pileated Woodpecker Video

Pileated woodpeckers have been making regular, usually daily, visits to the bird feeders in the front yard.  These birds are pretty impressive and I enjoy watching them on the suet feeder have a snack. 

They're a pretty impressive bird and you can hear the audible "whoosh" of their wings when they take off. I didn't catch the woodpecker taking off from suet feeder in this video, maybe next time.