Friday bullets - Feb. 25, 2022

We have almost made it through February! That always feels like a significant accomplishment.

• Today G. decided she wanted to bake a cake, so chose one she hadn't made before... angel food. (In full disclosure, I have never made an angel food cake myself. I dislike dealing with egg whites.) Well, she made a pretty fantastic angel food cake. See?

I had some frozen sour cherries in the freezer, so she also took some of those and made a cherry syrup to go along with it. It was very good.

• I realized that we are at about eight weeks from being able to plant the garden which means that I really need to start seedlings. So, I spent some time this afternoon finding all of my supplies from where I stashed them last year. And that is where I stopped. My seed starting medium had been stored outside and was completely frozen, so I will be starting seeds tomorrow once it has thawed.

• In other signs of spring (even though it's still well below freezing and there is till snow on the ground), the birds around us have been very active. Earlier this week I was cleaning stalls and heard and crazy amount of bird calls. I look out the front of the barn to discover a huge flock of red-winged blackbirds. This picture really doesn't do justice to just how many birds there were. (And I know no one here comes for the photographs.)

• The little sparrows who live in the barn are also beginning to build nests, but this last week the nest building was preceded by a lot of male sparrows doing quite a bit of showing off. 

If you look at the top of the peak, you can see the prime nesting space that they all battle over. 

• I also think that the migrating Canada geese are heading home. I have seen really enormous flocks flying overhead... much larger than we usually see in the winter.
• And now that I'm out of bird news, we'll go back to winter. A few days ago I realized that the stock tank heater wasn't really heating because I was having to break ice open a couple of times a day. So, even though spring is supposedly coming, I ordered a new stock tank heater and it arrived today. I'm not quite sure it works as well as the old one did in its prime, but it was at least keeping some of the water thawed. 
• We have a lot of silver maples in our yard and I've always wanted to try to tap them because evidently you can make syrup out of their sap. It's not quite as sweet as sugar maple sap, but it sounds like an interesting experiment. Well, this year I finally ordered tapping supplies. That seems like the easy part. The trickier part will be to figure out how to boil it down. We'll see if we actually have the wherewithal to figure it out this year.
• At teatime we began reading Jane Eyre. Before we could do this, though, I had to drive to the library and check out a copy. I was sure we had a copy of it somewhere, but I couldn't find it. I had also forgotten exactly how bleak and dark Jane's early childhood is.
• For those of you who watch The Amazing Race do you ever find yourself as you go about your day imagining that what you were doing is a race challenge and then pat yourself on the back because you would totally smoke everyone else? No? Only me? Can't you just see stall cleaning as a race challenge? 
• In my riding lessons I'd been working on doing low gymnastics. It is a series of small jumps and ground poles in a straight line so that the horse is going over something every other stride. I found it so intimidating because I was thinking about the whole thing individually. Well, on Monday, I finally understood that I couldn't see it as individual jumps but as one long exercise. For some reason thinking about it differently allowed me to finally be able to ride it. It felt like a huge success.
• I have too many books going at the moment.
• My laundry is back to being under control. A while back I was complaining about never being caught up on the laundry and J. suggested that thinking about it being under control would be a more helpful way to look at it. And it is, mainly because it takes away the expectation that it will at one point actually be finished. 

Enjoy your weekend!