pumpkin custard with frog eye pasta

See there should be a rule that the frog eye pasta box cant look so much like the tapioca box. Well I probably didn't need to worry about adding anything but the frozen and thawed pumpkin seemed runny and I'm way too lazy of a cook to strain it, plus thought it might dilute the taste. So I poured a little bit in my hand, dumped in the pumpkin and only then went "huh that doesn't look like tapioca"

I can report that the taste is fine and it didn't turn it into a tooth hazard. However it does have the odd chewy teeny piece of pasta amongst the custard. Oops. Can't be a picky eater when your cooking is as sloppy as mine is.

It was Nice weather again today. I was feeling sluggish, may need to have another round of zinc. I only filled my little cart twice on my pen cleaning project. The spot that was grossing me out could still stand some work but its mostly done. Should get the sheds scooped out next weekend if I can stay healthy and the tractor starts up for me. I rode RazzMo today. Shade came up to see me when I walked in to the pen, but she was not really wanting to go again- I was planning to ride Grey but he walked off and Razz is always 'take me, take me', course I never ride him very long so he thinks a little extra food + the attention is great. So I rode every day of my 4 day weekend, I was really blessed with good weather coinciding with work holiday and no family commitments this year.

Stuffed to the gills

I was hungry for some real food today so I heated the ham up instead of waiting for tomorrow. Its over 8 lbs so plenty left to keep feasting tomorrow. I also made scalloped potatoes for the first time. I know they are pretty easy but I've never made them and mom was sleeping off the flu. I was able to find a recipe it called for using powdered coffee creamer -that sounded yucky but it gave me the basic outline of flour and spices, butter and amount of milk/cream to use. They turned out pretty good, I don't think they tasted as good as moms usually do but they weren't nasty and watery. I also baked the yams I bought and for the record --yams need to be in pan or at least have a drip pan under them. Didn't set off the smoke alarm or anything drastic but did drip gooey yam juice on the stove bottom and make some burned smell.

I also rode Shade today. Second day in a row. We ponied Sadie on friday when it was 70F. Today it was low 50's and breezy. So I didn't want to mess with the sassy 2 yr old and Mia was wanting to come. Yesterday she was content to sleep at home and keep an ear and eye on the place. Worked out nice for me because I wont take Mia unless I can hop off and grab her leash that I make her drag, I just don't trust her not to get aggressive if we meet another dog.

I loff my bay mares. Well honestly I expect I will love Sadie but until I'm riding her its just fondness and anticipation that I think she'll be a fun ride. But I love Shade, she is just a wonderful match for me.

Thankful I finally got horses wormed!

Also thankful its just mom dad and I this year so we can do a meal any day of the long weekend or not at all, although I asked dad if he wanted ham or turkey today so it would be rather low of me to welsh at this point. I wanted to try the roasting bag method for turkey but we don't have any celery and I only bought 3 onions and intend to use half of one to make more hot stuff. Dr thought dad has a virus that has been lingering for 3 weeks and mom thinks she probably got it now. All the antibiotics she has been on she has very little immune system so she probably did catch it. I felt like I was coming down with something last week, hit the zinc hard for 3 days. Feels like I may have a quite subdued version. Some stuffiness and coughing up just a tiny bit of crud so I've been taking the hot stuff mixture at least 1x/day trying to ensure I don't get a full blown version.

I rode Razz today. Was thinking about riding Shade but she walked off and Razz came up. Worked out well, I didn't ride very long and then I wormed all the equines. We had a good freeze early this year; I could have wormed a month ago and I didn't get a summer worming done even for Sadie but shrug, they are wormed now. Shade and Grey have been seeming just a bit thin lately. They aren't bad. I've been feeding everybody but AJ the crappier hay since I don't ride much in winter and I don't have enough good hay to feed unless I segregate just Shade and Grey to feed --and they are not wild about the hay I bought. So I'm feeding more 'grain' and a higher fat/calorie grain as well, got the over due worming done and will watch and see if I need to change horses around and switch hays. Hopefully I can continue like this at least through december.

I love a short work week

Fairly busy today with work stuff so very good. I like having manageable scale things to get done it makes the work day go so much faster. I should get to some neglected personal obligations but its been nice just riding and doing a big of pen cleaning at home. I needed a stretch of fairly mindless tasks. Bought a temperature outlet control today. Should save some electricity on the tank heaters. I want to get some timing ones too but the co-op only had christmas light ones that start at dusk and can be set for X # of hours. I want to get something that can be set to go on at say midnight and off at 6am. If I had that and the temp on top so the heater wouldn't get juice if it was a warm night then I could just leave things plugged in. Oh well we have horse pens set up so that we only have 2 tank heaters this year and I could make it one and might do that if we get a long cold stretch but graining is much easier with them in these 2 groups. I can tailor grain at least somewhat and they usually get what I wanted them to have.

Sure is monday

my ISP or possibly just my home cpu's were having some trouble finding websites sunday and my blog was one of them so I wasn't able to post when I was happy from riding Razz on saturday and riding Shade and ponying Sadie on sunday. The weather was NICE, and it was a very pleasant surprise to have both days be nice when the extended forecasts had been predicting snow, then just cold fronts early last week. So let me type it again and remind myself that I have lots of happiness in my life. I rode twice on the weekend and got Sadie out and she was fun. Sadie has such a pretty floaty trot, I bet she'll be even smoother to ride than Shade AND I think she is going to be a lot less reactive. Still an arab but I *think* she is going to be bold/curious about a lot of stuff she notices where Shade sees danger first and then has to decide to check it out farther.

But its monday. Mom and dad are both sick. Dad must have got some secondary thing after having a cold when we were hunting. Or its a stubborn virus, he is tired and sleeping a lot. Some coughing but not a lot so I don't know about bronchitis or anything. Mom is sick as ever although I don't *think* she has jaw pain right now. Well she has been practically bedridden for so long it will take time and plenty of effort for her to get back to normal even if the jaw infection or whatever is fully gone. Sadly my reaction, especially with mom is just being irked because her dragging around moaning makes me feel like being lazy.

Co-workers mentioned the CRU "hack" (data dump IMO). They are not dismayed by the un-science that has been revealed, only that its now a harder sell to get the public/government to sign on to reduce CO2 emissions and its wrong for blogs to air those emails -well if there were only a couple bad emails out of the thousands it would bad to air them; but I don't think there is a whole lot of 'cherry picking' in selecting emails to publicize. Sighhhh, this is why I don't even begin to discuss politics with them, I don't want to hear it if they think the D's and the commie agenda are still 'da bomb'.

Not one of the 4 with kids responded to my email about kids coats to send to Iraq either. Not even 1 "sorry already dropped em off at coats for CO, or Salvation Army or no outgrown coats this year."

SNARK warning ::: I guess I shouldn't be surprised --they are liberals and want the government to handle all types of aid etc so they aren't obligated to be charitable or do anything---at least they think they want the government to handle things. They won't like it if they have to get a bureaucrat to sign off first when they want to drive to TX to see family or fly to Europe for vacation but it will be far too late by then.

I hate to be down on a saturday but

I think the only bright spot will be if I get my butt out and ride somebody a bit.

The senate is fixing to start debating the 'health care' bill. Its a monstrous tangle of socialist and facist crap and I fear it will pass anyway. Facist in the sense that big honking corporations will be at an advantage over innovative small companies that might become competitors in future.

The was a leak of data and information from the CRU. check out http://wattsupwiththat.com if you are interested.

CRU = climate research unit at east Anglia university in the UK. The leak is good, some light of day shining on the AGW cult and its egomaniac top proponents but the timing probably distracts U.S. folks from lobbying against the gubmint health care takeover. Plus MSM is ignoring this mostly and talking about the bad ethics of hacking I hope the internet is big enough that a bunch more people now realize what a bunch of commie propogandists many in the media have become. *update some MSM are covering it. WSJ (only paper I would consider subscribing to) Boston Herald, and probably others.

The fake hockey stick temperature plot is pretty well exposed. (modern tree ring proxy data didn't match modern temp records) and instead of realizing that the tree rings are not a good temperature proxy they (mostly Michael Mann) just added the thermometer data to the proxy data. Plus stuff about how they worked the peer review process to screen for people and viewpoints they wanted. A funny thing friday night our web server at work was just hammered. There is some emails from a climate scientist at ncar in the leaked stuff, is the story so big on the internet that folks were checking out everything related to ncar? Our group is not doing climate modeling, its just a newish method to measure atmospheric temps with radio occultation, studying our own atmosphere with techniques used to study Mars and Venus etc.

The ncar person comes off as pretty clean although his words could be interpreted to make him sound like just another propagandist, I suppose I am tending to give him a bit of extra benefit of the doubt. He believes in global warming with CO2 driving --of course I do also, its just that I NOW believe that all the fear mongering is based on half-baked computer models that assume water vapor as additional warming feedback --this is half-baked because cloud physics are NOT understood, no one knows if a slight temp increase from CO2 would result in more water VAPOR acting as additional greenhouse gas OR if that water will condense to clouds -letting less sunlight through and moderating warming. Let me say that again. NO ONE KNOWS -- I happen to know that the U.S. is still funding lots of research trying to crack the answer of when and how cloulds form and yet the AGW crowd is saying that it will all stay water vapor so it WILL magnify the warming.

In engineering one always wants to have huge safety factor etc and its certainly good to run models with the water vapor not cloud assumption to get worst case scenarios BUT to run models only with these assumptions and then to have fudge factors in the models to get some agreement with historical records and to go beyond that and even do some data fudging when the models mess up and don't get todays climate right when started from ie 50 years ago is piss poor science at best and given all the carbon trading scams could almost be considered criminal fraud, and it appears that some agencies were fudging data. They say they were correcting for instrument bias and drift with satellites etc but because they over trusted cpu models showing warming, they looked only for things that might be making instruments measure lower temps IMO.

If there was a right wing media conspiracy as Clinton used to get away with implying the presses would be red hot running stories about the trickery and 'old boys club' for getting papers published. Well don't hold your breath waiting for them, course I'll only know they covered it if I read it on the web since I don't waste my time on tv 'news' or reading the local fishwrapper. Both of them happen to be commie biased and I have not researched and found a traditional media source I trust although I know honest reporters and even whole honest papers are out there.

knocking wood but I'm not feeling sicker

the tickle in my nose has not come back at all and I have just a bit of throat irritation which may be dryness from the zinc lozenges. One good thing with them is I can't imagine anyone taking them when they feel healthy. I will keep up the attack measures through friday at least -- laugh all you want but I was knocked on my butt for 5 weeks with a sinus infection 5 years ago and ever since I take every measure I can to ward any kind of upper respiratory bug off.

wednesday whine

Cell phone and key card turned up so that is good. Now to the whines

Feel like I'm getting a cold, I'm pounding zinc and hot stuff mixture and thinking die viral scum die
I wanted to buy some zicam spray and the store only had oral stuff. I like to take both and hit the virus from multiple fronts.die viral scum die.

beware the electronics vortex

Sorry I couldn't invent a better term but it is being a bad period for electric devices for me: I have mislaid my card reader gizmo for the camera and my mac won't download the pics using the camera cord. CPU's make life so much better except when they SUCK. No pics from me until I either find one of 2 readers I should have, figure out if I need to install software from HP or break down and buy yet ANOTHER reader. My pics aren't worth a huge amount of effort or expense so I'll probably coast for a bit.

I have mislaid my cell phone too. I guess perhaps I'll have to call it tonight when I get home.

Then there was the drive to Meeker when my alternator died, I was lucky to be traveling with dad and sis and we had 2 vehicles and we were able get it fixed that day but along with the trend ....

My horse trailer has a fuse between the battery and the charge controller panel. It burned out on the trip --related to alternator?
Who knows, since we had a generator along which was working to power things when it was running and my trailer was plugged into it or I could turn on my pickup and have power and the weather was mild we did not search too hard up there --we thought my control panel might need to be fixed by a pro or possibly my battery was bad as I had let it get low on water.

Today I left my key card (at home?) so I will have to be careful tonight not to get locked out of my office suite area when I use the bathroom.

Hopefully that is all.

Brrr

Snow is falling outside the office window and it feels chilly. I should have worn a warmer shirt instead of the top item in the drawer today LOL, at least I always have a sweater in the office and I can add a polar fleece vest if shutting the door to stop cold air from the hallway is not enough.

I stopped and had the snow tires put on my car on the way to work this morning so I may find out if they change it from being utterly crappy to reasonable in a bit of snow but only the mountains are supposed to get much of this, we front rangers get some saturday night, wont hurt my feeling one bit if the roads are quite dry tonight. Well must stop procrastinating and do some actual work pretty soon but first my warm comfort food.

TGIF

I dont really wish the camping/hunting trip was still going as my back and neck were whining at me every morning in the wee hours although once I was up and moving they felt fine. But its hard to get back into the routine. Maybe I need to make a few changes. Haven't had enough coffee to ponder that yet today though.

I should get down some trip high and low lights while I still remember them. My 'new', 2003 truck had a Found On Road Dead trip. The alternator was bad, we thought it was just a bad battery when we had to charge the battery saturday morning to start it to take off. Nope it was the alternator. Good thing we were caravaning with dad and he had the generator and a battery charger along. + Integrity Auto in Gypsum is a wonderful mechanic. I hope his son enjoyed the trick or treating we delayed a bit. Oh and my usual luck held, I had to guess if it was a dual or single alternator, guessed single cuz we could only see one and that was correct but the mechanic told me on the dual alternator Fords the 2nd unit is not visible from the top. The generator cord got broken but dad knew how to fix that.

The west slope had similar weather, they had not gotten as much snow but the horse track out of camp was muddy the first few days. It was just a dozer cut trail. Grey lost a hind easy boot on the first day. We only went out for a couple hours to stretch horse legs since it was late by the time we got trailers leveled, generator cord repaired (again LOL) etc. The ground was pretty uneven and especially by the horse corrals where dad and N wanted us to park. My trailer was a foot off the ball in my pickup. The next couple of days I left the hind boots off him since it was not rocky where we were doing most of our riding.

We didn't harvest any deer or elk ourselves but the group of campers got 6 elk and one pretty nice buck. There was a couple with 3 horses that did most of the packing but CJ got to pack out the buck and one elk. That day I did have all 4 easy boots on and it was probably good as we went around the back part of the wildlife area and rode through some rocky areas but as I was leading CJ back with the elk so dad and N could keep hunting the darned hind easy boots twisted. One gouged Grey's heel bulb so I had to stop and get it off. No place to tie right there and the boot was not coming off, I was trying to get the cable over a hook to get more slack since it was too tender for Grey for me to open it normally. Cable kept shredding so finally I deliberately cut it through to get the boot off. I'm going to have to take a pic to illustrate this (tomorrow) Meanwhile the hunter had gone on ahead while I took the horses to water and was wondering where in heck I was -- I had a radio that did not have all the channels so I could not reply until L tuned her radio to relay a message. But eventually we got the elk back to camp and Grey was walking fine once the irritating boot was off although he had the scrape on his foot.

humph day vent

Probably not even a coherent one either but I cant stand it. My country is dying of a thousand shallow PC cuts. At least there are some who dare to say it but I sat on my hands at a forum because the membership is small and I didn't want to offend someone whose opinion in other areas is valued by the board and by me. I hate feeling like a coward but I always fail to speak my mind without being blunt and everyone else probably feels as I do but is also being polite, sigh.

And I really really want to help an animal rescue I like and am trying to keep cordial connections to make that happen but some days I just want to scream at arrogance masquerading as 'finer social manners than the peasants use'. Plus I am about ready to declare war on the agency that collects and SUPPOSEDLY distributes to designated charities the proceeds from charity sales. They better pay my rescue or refund the $ they collected from me if they don't want me to bring fraud charges against them and attempting to publicize them far and wide. I will make it my personal mission in life to get them shut down if they are dirty or even just incompetent. My charity is tiny and I know them so i KNOW they haven't gotten their money 6 weeks after it was deducted from my account -- I am wondering about all the donations the outfit collects for huge charities - are they only giving pennies on the dollar of what they collect?

I'm Back

I should have posted between the funeral trip to ND and going hunting but then again this is just my journal that I leave open, not a widely read blog with many folks left wondering where I was.

I must say it was really nice being away from internet access for a full 8 days. I never even took my camera out, we were usually trying to get going in the morning to possibly see some elk before they bedded down out of the warm sun and then hustling to get horses untacked and fed before it got dark when we came back in. Dad took a shot of CJ carrying a deer with the antlers tied on and Naomi leading him on Ramsey with a disposable camera so it could be a long while before I know if that picture even turned out. Now it is back to the daily routine for a while.