Life Happens

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." 

This saying was never so true as it has been for me recently. During the last couple of weeks, I have made two trips to the emergency room with two different family members. One was close by and one was several hours away. Subsequently, there was also a lot of time spent in a hospital. Both people are making forward progress, but it will be a long slow road. 

These events have brought a lot of things into focus, the most important being how lucky I am to have supportive family and friends. Also, it reminded me how very grateful I am for the people who have chosen the medical profession as their calling. It is not a job I could do. God Bless all of you.

Food Waste Friday and True Food Confessions--Jan. 10, 2014

It's time for Food Waste Friday, when the Frugalgirl encourages us to post pictures from the previous week of wasted food from our household. This accountability hopefully will help us to be more careful with our food and maybe save some money. Also, I am using this public forum to encourage us to eat out less which includes better meal planning. You can follow how we are doing in this endeavor by reading True Food Confessions. (Thanks to Jo from Simply Being Mum for sponsoring FWF this week.)

This Week's Food Waste

None

We saved an orange this week that was just starting to get a bad place in it. Otherwise things looked pretty good.

This Week's True Food Confessions

I think because we were still reeling from an overabundance of Christmas chocolate, we were motivated to eat reasonably well at home this week. The main features were a roasted chicken and potatoes. To go with the first night of the roasted chicken, we had roasted potatoes and cauliflower. The cauliflower was delicious but the potatoes did not roast so well. We used potatoes I had frozen by the blanching method and the texture was not very good. From the next batch of frozen potatoes, I will try simple boiling and mashing. They should turn out better that way. 

Another night we had baked potatoes from Idaho potatoes that need to be cooked. They were topped with chopped chicken, cheese, and sour cream. Yet another night we had chicken sandwiches and chicken burritos topped with various things including hummus, lettuce, and pepper jack cheese. And guess what, we also had baked potatoes and chicken legs with steamed carrots and apple slices another time. I think that about does it for the chicken and potato combos. I have had many green salads with cottage cheese and believe it or not, among all of the chicken dinners, we had time for one night of fish and and a couple of meals of chili which Miss Landers brought to us. 

A banner week for us, and surprisingly, I didn't feel overwhelmed by putting it all together. I have great skills for planning and cooking, but I don't have the enthusiasm or always have the ability to overcome certain emotional blocks to getting it done. However, one week at a time. Hope next week works as well.

A Second Look--Jan. 8, 2014

It's been a few weeks since I have been to the "back forty" or the lower part of the yard, so I decided it was a time to take a look. I don't want to get out of the habit of taking Second Looks around my yard through all parts of the year. There really is something very refreshing about seeing the changes that take place.

We have had rain, snow, ice, and subzero temperatures over the last week or so. Despite the bad weather, the critters have still been out and about. We spotted a pileated woodpecker this week as well as our old faithfuls of the red-bellied and downy woodpeckers. The deer are ever present and the squirrels are occasionally scurrying about. It seems as if bone season could be starting again like it did last winter. I found a groundhog skull, but it was too cold to do much looking for others.

Here are a few things I saw this week during my Second Look.

Even though we have had a lot of cold weather and snow, a few pansy blossoms are still hanging on. The snow had just melted from around this one.

The skies have been mostly dark this week, but a little sun still managed to peak through the clouds and light up this tree.

Woodpeckers--Pileated on the left, Red-bellied on the top and Downy on the bottom.

Part of a skull--a groundhog, I think.

No snow this day, so a good day for grazing.

We usually only see one or two cardinals, but this week we saw a flock of them pass through.

This squirrel had just had a treat from a suet cake.

We hadn't seen doves for a few months, but we also saw a flock of them this week.

The skies weren't always cloudy. We had a clear night this night.

Data Collecters Wanted

or Dog Owners Needed

I know there are many of you out there who are as interested as I am in experimenting and collecting data for scientific purposes. You may remember my ill-fated egg frying experiments, my potato chip size to bag comparisons, and the M &M taste test that is still getting off the ground. Well, I've heard about a new study that I would love to try to replicate if I only had a dog. But alas, I only have cats. So I'm hoping that some of you with dogs will collect data and report back so we can hear if your results agree with the findings of the study.

Miss Lander's dog that I may have to borrow.

The study I am referring to came out in the December 2013 journal of Frontiers in Zoology. It stated that for two years, German and Czech researchers watched a group of 70 dogs of various breeds poop* 1893 times and pee** 5589 times. What they discovered from their observations was that when there was a calm magnetic field (no sunspot flareups, etc.), the dogs preferred to poop with their body aligned in a north-south direction. At this point, the researchers don't know why, but they're pretty excited because this is the first time that they have actually seen that the earth's magnetic field affects a mammal other than for navigation.

Now if you're going try to do this experiment to be published in a peer-reviewed journal or for a grade in school, there are several things you should take into consideration like the daily activity of the magnetic field and whether or not your dog is on a leash.*** And to make your results meaningful, you should use circular statistics to norm this activity with your observations. But just for fun, you can just get a GPS/compass (or use the sun and moss on trees) to figure out which way is north and start paying attention when you're walking your dogs.

So who's going to start collecting data? Or have some of you already observed something like this in your dog's behavior already? I may have to borrow a dog. :)

*in the biology world known as defecate

**in the biology world known as urinate
***dogs on a leash didn't exhibit the N-S alignment

A little more:

Although I read a couple of news releases and the provisional abstract of the article in Frontiers in Zoology, the complete article was not yet available online. So I was left with many unanswered questions like:

Where'd they get the dogs and did they depend on owner reporting or was there carefully measured, unbiased observation?

What happened when the dogs peed? Any directional preference?

What was the actual statistical confidence in their numbers?

Was there any correlation in size of dog to the amount of magnetic field disturbance it took before it affected the pooping behavior?

Who thought this one up?

Thankful Sunday--January 5, 2013

I am thankful for my stainless steel mixing bowls.

We got a stainless steel set of mixing bowls for a wedding gift many years ago. They are still as good as new, and we use them daily. I was thankful for them when I got them, and I am even more thankful for them now.

Do you have something simple like my mixing bowls that is invaluable to you in the kitchen?