Cummings-Chappell Wedding Announcement

My mother couldn't wait any longer for us to be proper Midwesterners - meaning that one of the rites of passage is the wedding announcement in the local paper, which in this case is the Cavalier Chronicle.

John and I made the Community News page on Wednesday, October 30. Below you can see what other captivating news was happening that day in Pembina County, ND.

Geometric Snow Patterns

When you live in North Dakota, you can't fight the weather.  Cold and winter are going to happen whether you like it or not.  Winter might not be the most hospitable season to be outside, but if you're brave enough to venture outdoors, astounding beauty and cool stuff invariably awaits. Last winter after a storm we had awesome Snowdrifts and Icicles.  This year?  Who knows, but we're off to a good start.

We had a decent snow squall move through yesterday.  Over the course of an hour or so of moderate snowfall, we got a decent amount of accumulation.  Decent for early November at least.  I came home to find that the sun had melted the snow in the areas within reach of its warm rays, leaving stark patterns of snow and grass in the shady patches of the yard.

The 90 degree angle at the jog in the fence allowed the sun to melt the snow and form a near-perfect right angle. 

You can see where the shadow of the tree is cast.  The snow in the shadow remained on the ground, everything around it melted.

It was a pretty cool scene in the backyard for a few hours. By evening, the snow had all but disappeared, leaving these cool patterns nothing more than a memory. 

Three Year Puppy-Versary

Next week is the three year anniversary of Shadowfax (fka Whisper) coming to live with us here in North Dakota.  As a commemoration I added the YouTube video that her awesome foster Mom Michelle took more than three years ago.

You can see little miss spazzy puppy in all her puppy glory, flouncing and pouncing around with a toy.  I watch this video on occasion happily remembering what Shadowfax was like as a goofy, scrawny puppy.  Much has changed, she's gotten bigger and sturdier, but no less goofy.  And for the record, we bought her the same toy that she's seen playing with in the video (the Floppy Flier) and she shredded it in less than a minute. 

And in case you missed our post in 2011 on our One Year Puppy-Versary, you can check out the musical photo montage I made to mark the occasion.

Halloween Pictures

How about some festive Halloween pictures to get you in the Fall spirit?  Since I don't have any great pictures of myself/Alycia and the pups, I figured I'd pass along pictures of my super awesome nephew Jacob enjoying the autumn happenings. 

Super awesome nephew Jacob testing out the pumpkins at the pumpkin patch.  If they were strong enough to sit on, they were sturdy enough to make a good jack-o-lantern. 

Jacob dressed up as a firefighter for Halloween.  I'm pretty sure real firefighters are supposed to wear shoes, but we'll ignore those safety concerns for now. 

Jacob and his Mom.  Future firefighter with actual real life firefighter. 

Jacob and his buddy who lives s few houses down were both firefighters for Halloween.  This was apparently a very safe neighborhood this particular evening, safety personnel were on the scene. 

New Dog Bed

We recently acquired a new dog bed from Doctor's Foster and Smith, one of our favorite online retailers.  With winter coming up there's been more competition for the one heated dog bed in house, and with Tito's13th birthday coming up, we want to ensure that his old, creaky joints have a warm place to rest on cold winter days. 

So we got a big, fluffy dog bed (emphasis on big and fluffy) and a heating pad to put inside the dog bed to help keep our pups warm through this winter.  Preliminary results are promising.  The bed might be a little too big for Shaak Ti, but she doesn't seem to mind.  

The view from ground level truly shows the immensity of bigness and fluffiness that we're dealing with here.  Shaak Ti's nose and noggin are barely visible amidst all the coziness. 

Sweet Potato Harvest

There was much yard work to be done over the weekend to get ready for the first snow of the season.  We got an inch or so of wet snow on Sunday, but it was mostly melted by the end of the day.  I spent Saturday frantically getting the garden ready for winter, on the off chance that we got the 4 or 5 inches that were "possible" from the storm.  I had visions of everything being covered in snow until next Spring and that actually scared me into action. 

One task that needed to be completed was harvesting the sweet potatoes.  It was an experiment this year to grow them (we'd never tried before) and it was quite a success. 

I didn't so much "plant" the sweet potato as threw it in a collection of compost and shredded leaves from the previous autumn.  This was a seriously low maintenance experiment since it needed no tending whatsoever and because it was in range of the sprinkler, I didn't even need to manually water it.  

The leaves of the sweet potato vine were pretty well fried from the hard freeze we had over the last weeks, it was ready to come out. 

These were the vegetables of our non-labor - about a dozen sweet potatoes, three or four were pretty big.  After I harvested them, the remaining compost was broken down enough to top dress two raised beds in preparation for winter.  The sweet potato experiment?  Complete success.  A dozen sweet potatoes, virtually no effort, and a handy place to break down compost for use in the garden.  We'll do this next year for sure, maybe even have more than one sweet potato/compost bin. 

Fall Weather and First Snow

It's fall here in Eastern North Dakota.  The breeze has turned stronger and chillier, blowing the falling leaves in showers of autumn colors.  We've been swamped with pulling the last tomatoes, peppers,and eggplant from the garden and getting everything ready for winter.  The hard freeze on Wednesday night did in the last summer crops including the sweet potato vine that I need to wrangle and chop up into compost. 

The apple trees are holding onto their leaves (barely) and the marigolds somehow still look quite vibrant.  That may all change if we get some snow over the weekend.

From the National Weather Service:

THE FIRST ACCUMULATING SNOW OF THE SEASON IS POSSIBLE SATURDAY
NIGHT INTO SUNDAY. THERE COULD BE A BAND OF 1 TO 3 INCHES OF
SNOW ALONG A LINE FROM AROUND DEVILS LAKE TO GRAND FORKS TO
BEMIDJI. THE LOCATION OF THIS SNOW BAND WILL BECOME MORE CERTAIN
ONCE THE EXACT TRACK OF THE LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM IS KNOWN. IT WILL
GET VERY COLD BEHIND THIS ALBERTA CLIPPER...AND NORTHERLY WINDS
WILL INCREASE SUNDAY AND SUNDAY NIGHT. THE UNSEASONABLY COLD
WEATHER WILL CONTINUE NEXT WEEK.

We'll be busy as little beavers putting the rest of the garden to sleep for the winter, raking and chopping leaves and adding them to the raised beds.  As always, there's so much to do and so little time.  Nothing is quite as motivating though as the threat of snow, it's one heck of a deadline. 

Homemade Sauerkraut

This weekend brought a visit from Alycia's folks who came down to run errands and celebrate Alycia's Dad's birthday in the big city.  I'll be discrete and not tell you how old he is, but suffice to say he is retirement and Social Security eligible.  During the gardening season, and especially in late Summer and early Fall they always bring us gifts of extra produce from their gardens or their friends gardens when they visit.

This trip they brought green and red cabbage as well a large sack of apples.  We quickly turned the apples into a large pan of apple crisp, which pairs perfectly with my morning cup(s) of coffee.   The cabbage got sliced up, crunched into a crock, and is currently fermenting in the basement with the hope that it will soon become sauerkraut.

These are the good looking cabbages that Alycia's parents brought us.

I just chopped up the cabbage with a knife, though having a mandolin or more chopping patience could have yielded smaller grain of cabbage or more consistent size, but that's fine with me.

Making sauerkraut has always been on my list of things to try, but fear of the unknown and my hesitation to try fermentation (oh yeah I just rhymed), kept me from experimenting.  But sauerkraut is incredibly simple; just chop up the cabbage, put it in a crock, add salt, wait a few weeks.  Super easy. We'll know in another couple of weeks how it turned out, I'm looking forward to having a big jug of homemade sauerkraut sitting in the fridge all winter.