Picture Year in Review (2025) Part 6: Winter

 December, unfortunately, is going to get a post of its own, but I here is some photos from the rest of winter so far.  It is snowing like crazy today, but we haven't really had a lot of snow so far this year.  My husband managed to get a cool picture of the Northern lights one morning when he was heading out to work, though, so enjoy that!

A shot of our first real snowfall of the year.

I got a bunch of different baking projects done this winter, when I could squeeze in a moment or two and gave away some as gifts this holiday season.  Our neighbor across the road and we exchange gifts every year, pretty much, so I gave him a loaf of cheese bread this Christmas :).

Thanksgiving rolls turned out so pretty, I had to take a picture.

Rustic sourdough loaves that I used for French bread pizzas a few times.  They came out sort of flat, so it worked well for that.

Cheese bread.  I just took my normal bread recipe and when I was shaping the loaves for their second rise I incorporated a bunch of cheese into the dough.  Worked well.

Lastly is a little frugal thing I did.  I had bought some mandarin oranges that were on sale really cheap, figuring my daughter would eat them.  She did not, of course.  So, when the oranges started to look not great, I juiced them all, turned them into orange juice and used them in a few recipes.  I made orange chicken one night and then I used the rest to try Princess Diana's overnight oats recipe (I'll let you look that one up, if you feel the need).  The oats were good, I have to say.  I used dried cherries as I have a lot of them, and pecans in mine.  I also used my seven grain cereal mix instead of straight oatmeal.  It worked well and it made enough cereal to last most of the week.  I just heated the cereal up, added some greek yogurt to cool them off and added honey or maple syrup to sweeten and then added my garnishments.  Worked for me as I'm not a fan of the cold overnight oats.

And there you go folks.  Pictures of winter, 2025, sans December, which I'll get into in a later post as it is going to definitely bleed into this year.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review (2025), Part 5: Fall

Well, the biggest thing that happened this fall was our platinum plated cat *sigh*.  

Sepp managed to get out on Halloween (we had gone swimming that day and left the door open longer than normal because we were wrangling Alvah and he got out at some point in that kerfluffle).  I didn't realize he was outside until late when he hadn't touched his food and I called him in a few times.  He came in, but seemed to be moving a bit slower than normal, but it was kind of cold out, so I thought he was just cold and tired (felt terrible about the whole thing at the time...felt even worse about it later).  Fast forward to the next day (Saturday) and I lost track of him during the day due to being busy and then realized he hadn't touched his food all day long that night (he eats in the kitchen, so easier for me to keep track of it).  He had been sleeping on my bed downstairs when I left him in the morning and when I went down to check on him he was still sleeping in that location.  I immediately got worried as he's not a lazy cat by any stretch and is usually bouncing off the walls.  I picked him up and quickly saw he was disoriented when walking and he was favoring a back leg.  I brought him upstairs and made sure that he got food, and most importantly, water, down him and checked him over for wounds.  I found one on his back leg, but it didn't seem to be infected or really that bad, so I thought maybe he'd gotten. a bruise in his muscle from some fight or other.  By the time Sunday rolled around, he was WAY worse.  I had to basically feed him water and got him to lick some tuna and that was it.  He couldn't walk on his back leg at all and I was really getting scared he was on his way out with how bad he was getting.  

We got him into the vet first thing Monday morning and the vet had the same problem I did.  He was in bad shape for sure, but she couldn't find any wounds on him (not that he was cooperating either).  She gave him an anti-inflammatory and a long lasting antibiotic shot and we headed home.  After that Sepp improved immediately.  A few days later I noticed his tail up by his butt was wet and couldn't figure out how he did that until I saw the injury.  He was tore up on his back leg, like bad and the wound had ruptured.  The vet was able to fit him in and we ended up in surgery with him to suture up a couple of gnarly wounds on his back leg.  Fast forward to the sutures dissolving, the wound reopening and a second surgery to fix that and dude that poor cat spent all of November in a cone and we ended up in debt to get him fixed up.  He's only 2 1/2 at this point and a really good cat (kills lots of rodents), so it was worth it, but yet again, not an expense I saw coming.  Enjoy the pics of coned cat as he was desperately trying to get back outside all of November, probably to go after the cat who had humiliated him previously.  Poor cat still has a basically bald spot around his neck where the cone was and his backside is going take forever to grow back in.

Here are some other pictures that happened this fall...

Stuck with a small pie pumpkin for our Jack O' Lantern this Halloween.  Saved all of the pumpkin pieces, roasted them and used them to make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving.  Worked great and I plan to do that going forward.

Canning and other projects just aren't in the cards for me at this stage in my life, but a friend of ours was nice enough to gift us a pint of applesauce.  We ate it with pork chops one night and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I was able to return the jar to her with a thank you note since she does a lot of canning.  

And one last pic of the fall foliage.  It was wet this fall too, but the trees held onto their leaves pretty well for a while, so we got to enjoy the leaves changing color.

Enjoy!

Picture Year in Review (2025), Part 4: Summertime

Happy New Year, everyone.  This post took a bit to put together due to being busy with beginning year paperwork.  I got PFD's filed for the year, got psychological evals done for the son for his three year review period for the homeschool and other things, so it's been busy on top of the weather being insane the last bit.  I'll get into more of that later (ugh, December), but in the meantime, let's get to some random summertime pictures around here.

One big thing that happened this summer, which wasn't something I had planned on and wasn't thrilled about, was our well pump started to die in a big way and we finally realized it needed to be replaced when it wouldn't keep pressure up no matter how my husband adjusted it.  That was a hefty expense to replace, but it was due (it was over 20 years old by the date on the old pump when it was pulled up).  We called up Arctic Pump and Well to get the pump replaced as my husband knew them and knew they did great work and would have as good of quality parts as could be sourced now a days.  Jim was really nice to deal with and we've been really happy to have well pressure again since then.  Fun fact was that he knew the previous owners of our house (I used to talk to the guy who built this place at the kid's elementary school every day, so it was fun to find that Jim was friends with them, too) and remembered the last time he had replaced the pump and stuff.  I just find it kind of cool that we know so much about the original owners of the property.  I know Allen, the guy who built our house, is a really cool and nice guy and it was fun finding out more of the background of Carol, the woman we bought our house from (Allen and Carrol had divorced years ago).  Just as a side note, forgive the state of our lawn.  It was so ridiculously wet this summer that it was too wet to mow and quickly went crazy.

Anyway, yeah, it was an expensive year around here (and we are still dealing with 2025 to date...double ugh).  Onto other pictures.

Armina graduated this summer, which was a big accomplishment for both of us.  I was happy that she had excelled so much in homeschool as when I pulled her out of public school her reading abilities were abysmal and she was falling further and further behind in math.  Math is still a sore spot for her, but her reading abilities I'm very proud of as she reads for pleasure all the time now.

Alvah's favorite hobby this summer was playing in the grass and rolling all over the yard.  I apologize for the blurred face, but Alvah is old enough that I really don't feel comfortable showing his face so much as he, obviously, can't consent to his face being online.  The graduation photo I don't know any of hte people in it, so wanted to make sure to blur their faces for privacy as well :).

Schoolwork this year has been a lot of Leapfrog videos with how bad Alvah's mood has been.  Luckily, he likes Leapfrog, which makes it easier.

On the rare event we went through a day without rain (somehow I did manage to get a bunch of grilling done this summer, despite the wet, which was nice), our skies were beautiful but had some crazy cloud formations.  I included a coulple of them for fun.

Enjoy!