A nice winter walk, with a couple of bonus sightings

On the morning news I heard the high temperature today would be 20°.  I'd been out with Gabe earlier, so I knew there wasn't much wind (it's picked up since then).  Tomorrow the high is forecast to be 5°, so I figured I'd better take Gabe to the pasture today.  I knew, with my heavy, long coat, that I wouldn't get too cold.  I used to wonder about Gabe; but he is on the run all the time we're out there, and is actually panting once we've been out for five minutes, as you will see in the following video.  We scared up a nice, big deer back by the pond, and later on, a turkey flew out of a tree and surprised me.  Gabe never saw it; he was focused on sniffing everything on the ground.  I love those little bonuses from Mother Nature. 

 

It's already five degrees warmer than they forecast.  I hope that happens tomorrow, because we can use it!

There is something about winter that makes me crave oranges and grapefruits.  I absolutely can't get enough of them.  They are so very high-priced these days, and yet if I figure out the cost per fruit, it's no more than a candy bar.  So I buy them and eat one a day.  Cliff isn't supposed to eat grapefruits (lipitor), and he says it's too much trouble to peel oranges.  To be honest, I don't think either of the fruits are near the top of a list of fruits he likes.  So I get all of them.  The problem with buying grapefruits is that for many years, my sister went to Texas for the winter, and she had a grapefruit tree in her back yard there.  When she came back to Kansas City in the spring, she'd bring bushels of them home with her and give lots of them to me.  They were so much sweeter and better than anything in the store, and I was likely to eat three or four in a day.  

Here's a thing that amazes me about citrus fruits:  You can leave them on the tree for weeks or months, and they don't rot!  Once apples, pears, and peaches are ripe, they need to be picked soon or they'll fall to the ground where they ruin.  My sister would bag up her excess grapefruits in March, after she'd been eating them off the tree since January, and they were sweeter than the sweetest orange you've ever tasted.  Oranges these days aren't as sweet as they once were, either.  The same is true with apples.  I think it's because when scientists began developing fruit that would keep longer and travel better, the taste of some things suffered.  Thank goodness, so far peaches are as good as they ever were.  That is, if you can get them from an orchard rather than a super market.

We have beef stew left over from yesterday, so I don't have to do anything but heat it up.  Because we had bacon and eggs for breakfast, I told Cliff we're delaying dinner until 1 o'clock.  I won't be hungry until then, I'm sure, and since I'm the cook, we'll go by my appetite.

We hauled the steers to the butcher yesterday.  I must say it's a rather hollow feeling to have no cows, and no plans to ever have any more.  This is pretty silly, but I keep thinking it would be nice to buy a cheap little Jersey bull calf, have Cliff make it a steer, and keep it just as a pet.  It wouldn't have any sex drive to make it run away from home, and if I raised it alone, it would settle for human companionship and wouldn't be looking for a herd of cows to run with.  That's about the only possible way I can see for me to keep a cow around.  And I'm pretty sure I know what Cliff would say about that, although I can guarantee you if it was something I felt I really wanted, he'd see that I got it... just so I don't want a goat.  I'm afraid we'd have some words about that subject.  

I just finished reading "Educated" by Tara Westover.  Best book I've read in a long, long time, and I've read a lot of good ones lately.  If you'd like to see what Bill Gates has to say about the book, click HERE.  All I have to say is this:  read it, even if you normally never read anything but a cookbook.  It's all true, except for the names being changed.  It's thrilling, it's sad, it's amazing.  It shows how much strength a person can really have.  

Keep warm, and remember, spring WILL come again.