Thinking about eagles and light and stars

Our drive down to The Lake today confirmed our reasons for going there at least once a day just to see what's new.  Today we were surprised to see that the ice in the channel of water leading into the marina was nearly totally SMOOTH!  And this is strange because the last time we saw it on Saturday, it was a jumbled mess of frozen ice chunks.  So, what happened?  How did it get all smoothed out because it certainly wasn't any result of melting!  It's been too cold for that.  But it's also been very windy, so perhaps surface water blew inland and everything froze to almost a skating-rink smooth condition.  Just a hypothesis, of course..."I'm not a scientist."  (Hmmm, where have I heard that before?)

Our other sighting today was eagles--actually four eagles!  They were sitting out on the ice edges and finding something tasty to interest them out there.  

Here's two of them together.  The other two were over to the west but even further out...so even smaller specks in my picture.  While we were there, we saw Laura Erickson who does a blog about birds--Laura's Birding Blog.  She is from Duluth but has family connections here and often comes to visit her favorite bird haunts.  Today she was looking for snowy owls which have been seen here lately, but not by us!

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What's really been on my mind lately has been my cousin, Ingabritt, from Sweden-now-Greece.  Early yesterday morning I received an email from her husband, Harry (Hariton), telling me that she had passed away on Saturday.  She is the person who was my inspiration to begin blogging just a year ago when I reconnected with her for the first time since the early 1980's.  In spite of breast cancer and all the necessary treatments since 2007, she has lived life to the fullest as a journalist, wife, mother of three, and friend to many!  I'm so glad I found her last year.

 I met her husband, Harry, when we visited Ingabritt in Stockholm in 1979.  Jeff and I were on a three-week Eurail trip through Europe after being discharged from the Army in Augsburg, Germany.  Harry was an astronomy student back then and is now an astronomer in Greece.  In an email I received from him today, he said that as part of the UNESCO 2015 International Year of Light, highlighting for the world the importance of light and optical technology in our lives, he was able to name a star Ingabritt-Maria in her name.  So nice!  I usually go out on our front porch on clear nights to see the stars and check for northern lights.  Our dark skies always make it a great show!

I hope I'm not sharing too much, but he also said that she was brave and at peace to the end.  Her daughter will be having a baby any day now and Ingabritt was sitting up and knitting baby clothes for her first grandchild until Friday, the day before she passed away!  I knew she was my mentor for my blogging project, but today I realized she will also be my mentor on how to live and now even on how to face death.  What a gift!

Adjö, Ingabritt, och många tack!

Labor Day already! Can you feel the gears shift?

If you come from Minnesota, Labor Day is the day before the first day of school.  There was always great anxiety in our house the evening of Labor Day with two little girls getting backpacks and new outfits ready for the next day.  And I probably added my own anxiety since I also was starting school/work that next day.  (Not a problem anymore!  Yay!)

I grew up in Wisconsin and Illinois where we started school late in August.  So any anxiety about starting school was past and it was a day to work around the house and yard.  I remember lots of car washing happening on Labor Day.  And, since my parents' anniversary was on September 7th, some years--when the dates coincided and they remembered--that became part of Labor Day remembrances.

Today we awoke to a rushing creek flowing in the ravine behind our house following the gully-washer of a storm last night.  Our guests wondered if we had arranged the evening's show last night, especially that one mighty CR-AAA-CK right near the house that we're sure took down a tree somewhere.  (More on our guests below) The rain gauge only showed 1 1/2 inches of rain but the creek showed more!

This has been a dried up bed of clay since June!  Like I said...gully-washer!

And this is the road up to our trails.  I don't think we'll be making any 4-wheeler trips up to the meadow anytime soon without tearing up the road.

Tomorrow we're going to try to remember to go down to Twin Falls where all this water leads.

So, we went with the "labor" theme today and took care of some veggies.   We made another batch of "Best Ever Sliced Luncheon Pickles," taken from my mother's 1966 edition of the St. Croix County, Wisconsin, Extension Homemakers Cookbook.  Can you tell the age by the name of the recipe?  You just don't hear the word "luncheon" much anymore!  They are really good though!  Cucumbers, onions, red and green peppers, vinegar, sugar and salt.  Not processed, just kept in the fridge.

Also, we made a first attempt at dilly beans.  Until this past year I don't think I've ever heard of dilly beans, but everyone talks about them around here, so we gave them a try.  Then we froze the rest of the beans, although there are many more out on the vines.  Tomorrow we'll try freezing carrots.  We have many more in the ground and no good place to store them over winter.  And...we're going to try basil pesto with pine nuts--you grind it all up, freeze it in cubes in ice cube trays, and throw in a cube or two into spaghetti or something similar.  Love this time of year!

If you check my blogroll on the right, you will see a new blog listed there called My Minnesota, and the author/blogger is John Harrington who stayed with us as B&B guests last night.  He and his "Better Half" were on a getaway and explored our part of the Lake and Wisconsin while they were here.  Check out his blog today to see what he discovered!

Finally, we "discovered" this mom and kids out on our ride tonight.  It was past dusk and almost dark, so they look like I've applied an effect to the picture.  No effect, but didn't they pose nicely?

Happy first day of school to all our school friends!

One hundred days of blog posts!

I've posted every day for 100 days!  Yay!  When I started I thought I'd make it a week, two weeks, maybe a month, and that I'd never find enough things to write about.  Surprise, surprise!  Good thing I made it to 100 today because tomorrow I may be someplace where there is no wifi, or I can get creative just with my iPhone.  We'll see...

Today's been a busy one from morning to night.  Breakfast at The Port with friends, then home for more mowing--we have a LOT of yard!  Leann spent much of the day trimming around the apple & cherry trees in the orchard, and resetting fencing around some of the smaller trees to keep the deer from chewing off the ends of the branches.  And I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture, because the orchard is BEAUTIFUL!  But next week the apple blossoms should pop, so there will be lots of photos then!

And today our dirt was delivered!

It looks like a lot, but we're going to have help getting it moved to the raised beds.  Leann did load some up in our Ranger UTV--"Cammie"--and moved it to our new 3-level flower bed.  We ordered it online from Home Depot, but we're still not sure what we'll plant in it.  Herbs, for sure, but something else, too.

Having "Cammie" around has been so helpful for hauling stuff around here, and we have fun going back on our trails, too.  Cammie came as a gift from Leann's Mom & Dad a couple years ago.  We had never seriously thought about getting one, but her Dad thought we needed one.  I guess he was right, because we're using it all the time!

A little more dirt and this will be ready to add some plants.

So we spent most of today outside--out in the grass, in the orchard, and late this afternoon we took Cammie up into the meadow on our trails, even going all the way back to the far corner of our property--first time it was dry enough to go all the way.  No trees down over the trails from winter!  So that's a lot of time in the trees, long grass, and the negative consequence of all that "woods" time is...

...yes, wood ticks.  As soon as you sit still for a minute, a faint feeling of movement lets you know you have a wood tick somewhere on you.  These are only about 1/4 inch in size and aren't the more dangerous deer ticks--about the size of the head of a pin.  I've only had this one tonight, but I still feel kind of...itchy!

Happy 100 days!

Seduced by stats

Stats for this past week

An unexpected little "zing" I get from doing this blog every day is checking on the statistics that Blogger maintains for me.

On the back end "admin" side of my blog, it shows me a few different things:

• the number of times my blog has been accessed per day, week, month and all-time
• how many views each individual post received per day/week/month/all-time, so maybe it's the title that might catch a reader's eye.
• information about who my audience is

• in what country they are reading it 

• what site they used to get to my blog (Facebook, an RSS feed like Feedly, other blogs, etc)

• which internet browser they are using (Explorer, Firefox, Safari, etc) 

• what type of computer operating system they are using (Windows, Macintosh, iPad, iPhone, etc).  We used this last piece of information a few years back when I was doing webpages for our school and we realized how many people were accessing our site using mobile phones.  That showed us that we needed to also be making a mobile version of our website available to our parents/visitors or the information on the small phone screen is too small to see.

Make you nervous?  Sound like NSA is spying?   Maybe but every website you go to gives out that kind of analytics information. It's how they know what to try to sell you.  That didn't help, did it?

Here's how it looks for me:

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But the source of statistics that really caught my eye - literally - came from my blog mentor's sidebar.  I don't know if she realizes she is my mentor, but I found this Flag Counter widget on her site.

Of course her blog has been going for seven or eight years so she has LOTS of flags with thousands of visitors, but it's just so cool when a new state or country shows up.  Right now I have 16 states, 8 countries, and Norway just showed up as my "New Flag" this morning!  

It really doesn't take much to keep me entertained!