Christmas 2010

Christmas eve dinner




It's hard not to overload your plate.



Grandma & Grandpa



Casualties...



Short track speed skating oval.



Mik burning through the final turn.



Straw in the doghouse, warm sunshine, does life get any better?



Pond hockey at its finest.


Dangerous Dan, also recipient of the the most spectacular speed skating award on the legendary "Death Course"



Fast and furious action on the rink...



...drew spectators from far and near.

In the more demanding form of pond hockey, nets are dispensed with. Instead, one must hit the bucket with the puck, a far more difficult target.

The path to the henhouse...

Where the cock-of-the-walk presides

...and keeps the hens on task.

Jeni quickly discovered that a down jacket gets a little warm for snowshoing on a sunny day.

Between skiing, skating, hockey, etc. copious amounts of coffee and coffee breads, cookies, etc. were consumed.

Jeni outfitted with her new librarian glasses and bookbag

Burning the midnight oil (candles).

Pond Hockey

Pond hockey is arguably the purest form of hockey. It is generally uncorrupted by rules, excessive equipment, indoor machine-groomed ice, referees, etc.


Mother nature plays an important role, however, in determining the smoothness and size of the ice surface available to play on. Generally, this is about as much as you care to shovel off on an ongoing basis.


The advantage of a small rink quickly become apparent as it allows you to get up and down the ice without become winded after a single rush.


Competition plays a part, but laughter and good humor play a larger part. You can't take hockey too seriously when your skate is likely to fall into a deep rut and your goal is a five gallon pail lying on its side.


Still everyone tries their best.


Since there are no lines, camping out in front of the goal is a common strategy.


Generally more attention is paid to offense than defense, and most goals are scored on breakaways caused by having no one left back.


Even on a breakaway, putting the puck inside a pail is no sure thing.

Ice Rink

What's David doing at the pond?


He's carrying a big white pail....


...and pouring water on the ice.


And you didn't believe me!


He's dipping it out of a hole in the ice...


...a pretty big hole.




...and then he waters the ice.


To grow ice flowers?


Ice berries?




Or to chase that black thing they call a "puck"?


Maybe the man in the moon knows.


And they think we do silly things.

Winter Settles In

You may take blue skies for granted during the summer, but during a Copper Country winter even a small patch of blue is a jewel.


While we rarely get the bitterly cold weather common to Northern Minnesota, we have already gotten several below zero nights.


Evening grosbeaks at our bird feeder.


An evening spent in the garage drilling holes in the seat blanks for two rocking chairs. I align the pencil lines on the seat with one on the table in order to get the right angles for the legs, back spindles and armrests. Once this is done, the hardest part is over.



Savu got left behind when Jonathan took Kalevi skijoring...


...and expressed his dismay in true Siberian Husky fashion. A chorus of huskies howling is a beautiful, wild sound.

Getting a Christmas tree. This spruce was about 25 feet high, but as it is close the garden, I felt justified in felling it....

for the top eight feet.

Another patch of blue on a cold, blustery day.

The Effects of Lake Effect Snow

When the wind is out of the Northwest and the temperature is around 20 or lower you can count on lake effect snow. This snow is usually quite dry and fluffy and easy to move. The clouds form bands that pass overhead like waves so that the snowfall is alternately heavy and light. Although the snow is fluffy it can pile up at the rate of several inches an hour.


I once asked a friend of mine who uses a snowscoop to clear his driveway why he never got a snowblower. His response was that he had never seen anyone operating one who looked like he was having fun. Inevitably the snow is blown back into your face and find yourself wrestling with to a misery wip (the oldtime loggers term for a two handled crosscut saw). This year I built a covered cab for my tractor complete with a polycarbonate windshield, windshield wiper and plastic sides. While it's not quite as comfortable as the warm cab of a pickup truck, it is a huge improvement over sitting atop an open tractor. I could have bought a heated cab for for about 4 grand, but I elected to spend a little over a hundred bucks and build one myself.

Winter evenings are long, but they're good for woodworking in the garage. Here I'm gluing up some oak boards for a rocking chair seat. I've never built a chair with oak before, so I am interested in seeing how it turns out. One of the advantages of oak is that because it has an open grain it finishes very well with 120 grit sandpaper. Tight grained woods like cherry require much more sanding - typically beginning with 80 grit and progressing through 120, 150, 180 down to at least 220. If you really want to make it shine you should continue on to 320, 400, & 600 grit. Oak is much more forgiving because fine sandpaper scratches disappear in its porous surface.

The beginnings of two chair seats. I'm planning to add a wide lip in front to make a long curved slope for your legs to rest on and another in the back as a riser into which the back slats are joined - similar to rockers I have seen in Finland. Oak has another interesting property: if you wet it with a vinegar in which you have soaked steel wool, the wood ebonizes - turns black. I may play with that also.

Last summer our garden was invaded and overrun by pumpkins. We watched them choke out our beans, dominate our potatoes and humble our corn. When we tried to fight back we were scratched by their rough vines and mocked by their explosive regrowth. So we bided our time, waiting to take our revenge.

Here is what a pumpkin looks like that has finally met its match. It has been disembowled, cut up, baked, skinned and ground into mush...

And to add insult to injury, poured into old peanut butter jars. Presently we have thirty jars of pumpkin mash in our freezers. Each jar will make one pumpkin pie. Do the math; we're getting the last laugh. The canning funnel shown in this picture, by the way, is one of the most elegant inventions I know of - simple and effective. It does what it was designed to do so well that it is joy to use. After years of trying to fill jars like these with things like crushed strawberries without spilling any on the outside of the jar, this little device makes it ridiculously simple. If you don't have one you need one.