Down Comes the Tree

Alas, after gracing our great room for the last three months, our Christmas tree was dismantled this weekend. We held out for as long as we could, but we couldn't deny the inevitable any longer. The tree wasn't taking water anymore, but the final straw was when one of the strings of lights on the tree stopped working last weekend. You know your tree has been up too long when a brand new string of lights burns out before you take the tree down. Either that, or the lights were cheap. (Probably the latter.) And yes, we still turned the lights on.

Since he happened to be visiting, Leif gave us a hand with the disassembly. We decided to cut off the lower (wider) branches before taking it out of the room, to make it easier to navigate down the hall and out the front door. When the tree was freshly cut, it was very pliable and easy to manage. Now, however, we were worried about leaving a trail of needles and branches leading all the way out the door.

By the time we got the tree out the door, it was getting late, it was raining, and we were getting tired. So we left the tree in pieces on our front steps. It would be another week before we were home during daylight hours to finish the job. And while the tree may now be gone, it is not forgotten; we'll get to enjoy it again next winter when it helps to heat our house.

- Mike (& Corinne)

More Snow! More Snowboarding!

Boy, what a difference a week can make! It had been getting pretty warm around here recently, and we were beginning to worry that our snowboarding season would be cut short. Thankfully, over the last week Mother Nature cooperated and provided us with a plethora of snow, both on the mountain and at home. The snow depth at the base of Mt Hood Meadows has gone from 6' to 11' in the past week. Not too shabby!

I guess we're getting more confident on the mountain now, too; this is the second week in a row in which we not only packed and carried our lunch on our back, but we also brought our camera up and weren't constantly worried about crushing it.

- Mike (& Corinne)

Oysters on the Half-pipe

Tara and Jason, who are now officially members of our "Frequent Visitors Club", were down from Seattle visiting this weekend. And as always, we had a great time with them.

This trip revolved around two activities: cooking/eating, and snowboarding/skiing. We even managed to combine the two by picnicking on salami sandwiches halfway down the mountain! I don't think I've ever had them taste better than right in the middle of a day of snowboarding. The weather was perfectly clear on the mountain, as you can see. From above the tree-line, you could see for miles, including nice views of Mt Jefferson and the Three Sisters to the South. The warmth also softened the snow, which makes it a bit slower (good for all of us beginners!)

One of the reasons we keep allowing Tara and Jason to come back is that they always bring such great food with them. This time, they brought wine, French cheese, and raw oysters. Tara is such an oyster fan that for her birthday, Jason gave her the gift of her own personal oyster shucker. We took advantage of those skills ourselves and had oysters on the half-shell as a key component of our brunch. Corinne also made a batch of Cardamom Rolls, a slight modification of our beloved Cinnamon Rolls recipe. It turns out that we made so many dishes with some of Jason's favorite ingredients - cardamom, ricotta, Dutch babies - that Tara accused Corinne of trying to steal him from her!



A word of warning: if you look closely at Jason's left hand, you can see what can happen to a careless oyster shucker. Don't say we didn't warn you.

- Mike (& Corinne)

The Triumvirate Falls

You won't find too many posts about work on this blog; it's much more fun to pretend that we don't have to work. This post, however, is the exception.

There aren't many opportunities in life to work at the same company as your spouse and brother (in-law), so we were all pretty excited when Corinne, Leif and myself were all hired by Insitu back in 2004. At the time we were hired, between the three of us we comprised almost 10% of the company! (Presently we only make up 1.5% - one of the downsides of growth).

But alas, that triumvirate is coming to an end. For a variety of reasons, Leif has decided to move on from Insitu at the end of this month. He has, however, decided that he likes this area so much that he's not going to move. So in the end, we may end up seeing him more than we did when we worked at the same company. Funny how that goes.

Wish him luck!

- Mike (& Corinne (& Leif))

"Cabin Fever" Festival

We love our community! Every winter, Trout Lake holds a "Cabin Fever" festival. Being the small, Northwest community that it is, this free event is full of outdoor oriented events. We didn't join in the cross-country ski race (since we don't know how), but instead spent the morning on a guided snowshoe walk around the Trout Lake Wetlands Natural Area Preserve. The snow was all pretty old, so we weren't able to do any significant animal track identification, but at least we now know that there is a Trout Lake Wetlands Natural Area Preserve! This "wetlands" is where Trout Lake got its name; the lake is now going through transformation and can only be considered a lake during short periods of the year. Eventually, the lake will disappear altogether, but during this transition period it makes a great environment for studying nature.

In the afternoon we attended a GPS clinic, learning some of the tricks and methods for using a GPS unit in the wilderness. The best thing about going to this clinic, actually, was that it prompted Corinne to actually read the users' manual to prepare for the class! Eventually we may actually remember to bring our GPS unit out into the wilderness with us. With at least one set of extra batteries, of course.

- Mike (& Corinne)

Our First Coyote Sighting

One recent night when we arrived home from work, as we turned up our driveway we noticed an animal in our orchard. This is certainly not unusual; we often see deer grazing in the orchard, eating the fruit that has fallen from the tree.

But there were two things different this time. For one, we haven't seen deer around our place in at least a month. As the snow level falls, the deer move further south to where the grass and other ground cover isn't perpetually covered by snow. But the other, more substantial difference, is that what we had initially assumed was a deer was only a few feet tall. As soon as we turned the corner, he took one look in our direction and quickly head over the ridge to the edge of the forest, where he waited in the shadows. We could barely see his pointed ears in the moon light, and by the time our car made it close enough to see better, he was off into the forest.

After parking, we head back down to check out the tracks. The snow wasn't particularly new, so the iciness didn't leave very clear tracks. It wasn't until several days later when we were working in the orchard (knocking down the remaining fruit from the trees and gathering them up - a dirty orchard breeds pests!) when we became sure of what we'd seen.

It was surely a coyote.

The ground underneath the one tree in the orchard which still has remains of fruit is scattered with A LOT of coyote droppings. They clearly frequent our dining establishment, only I guess they do it off-hours. We hear coyote howling at night on a fairly regular basis, but this was our first sighting.

- Mike (& Corinne)

Favorite New Recipes of 2006

Finally, the long-mentioned "Favorite New Recipes of the Year" post arrives! These are all recipes which were new to us in 2006; this year's all came from other external sources (i.e. we didn't invent them), but they sure were good.

There was a definite theme to many of the new recipes we made this year: they included things we grew ourselves. Two out of the three recipes involve fresh, home-grown tomatoes. If you don't have your own tomatoes, grow some. If you can't do that, find a farmers' market in the summer and buy some from a local farmer. If you can't do that, don't bother to make these tomato recipes. They really need the full flavor and freshness of fresh, ripe tomatoes. And as everybody knows, you can't buy tomatoes from a grocery store. Sure, you can buy something that LOOKS like a tomato from the store, but that is where the similarities end.

#1: Linguine with Sweet 100 Tomatoes, Basil & Cream

Source: Gardeners' Community Cookbook

In retrospect, I wish I had taken photos of this dish. If I did, I'd be drooling while looking at them right now. Whenever we harvested our Golden Nugget tomatoes, we would make this dish. Since the tomatoes we had were of the slightly larger variety (see notes), we cut them in half before cooking. This dish is so simple, yet incredibly flavorful. It is truly amazing what fresh, in-season food can taste like!

Tomatoes, garlic, heavy cream, fresh basil... how can you possibly go wrong?

#2: Tomato, Basil and Cheese Pie

Source: Gardeners' Community Cookbook

This was another frequent favorite during tomato season, and the recipe came from the same cookbook as #1. It is a bit more complicated, because you have to make a tart crust. But before you get all scared, tart crusts aren't actually that difficult. After all, you do most of the work in the food processor.

#3: Overnight Cinnamon Rolls

Source: Good Eats: House of the Rising Bun

Lest you thought we restricted ourselves to only healthy food that we grew ourselves... there's nothing quite like homemade cinnamon buns. The first time we made this recipe, we used the wrong type of yeast - we used the more common "active dry yeast" rather than "instant yeast". The buns didn't rise. But even the "failures" tasted pretty dang good.

You do have to have a bit of patience and plan ahead; after all, the word "Overnight" is right in the name. But they sure beat the heck out of anything Cinnabomb ever produced.

#4: Sake Salmon and Rice

Source: Nigella Feasts: Delicious Dinners

We don't cook fish that often, mostly because I don't have a lot of experience with it (catch-22, of course). This salmon dish, however, is easy and so delicious. It even tastes great with Atlantic farm-raised salmon, for all you still back on the East Coast!

I'm going to try to do this every year from this point on! And next year, I need to take more photos...

- Mike (& Corinne)

Snowshoeing on Mt. Adams

Corinne has a plan for us to learn a new sport each season. Last winter we learned snowboarding, and the winter sport on the schedule for '06-'07 is snowshoeing!

As luck would have it, our friend Judith had two pair of snowshoes that she and her husband haven't used in a while, so she loaned them to us as "trial" shoes to see if we liked it before diving in to buy our own. The first time out, we simply walked around our property. I wasn't sure how I would like it, but it's basically like hiking on snow and is quite fun.

For our next outing, we joined up with our friends Jesse and Catherine for a snowshoe adventure they had planned on Mt Adams. They had chosen a Sno-Park on the mountain that was far enough up the mountain that it would hopefully be less populated; but more importantly there were no official snowmobile trails at this particular park, so we hopefully would avoid the disruption (noise, pollution) that they bring.

The weather was almost perfect - it was clear and slightly above freezing, although it would have been nice to have some fresh snow. We spent some time walking along trails, most of which had not yet been disturbed by other explorers since the last snowfall. We brought along our book of Animal Tracks, so whenever we saw some fresh tracks we all stopped to attempt identification. Trained animal trackers we are not; with the help of the book we were able to positively identify hare tracks, but other than that we were guessing.

This is what the Northwest is all about!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Happy New Year!

After all of the craziness of the holidays, by New Year's Eve it was just us at home.


Happy 2007!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Decorating Cookies

While Loren and Amy were visiting, one of the big activities was baking and decorating sugar cookies. Corinne has accumulated a huge number of cookie cutters, food colorings, pastry tips & bags, and other decorating accessories, and this was the perfect time to put them to use!



The decorating did not go without incident, however. There was, shall we say, an accident...

Between the four of us, we baked and decorated several dozen cookies. Considering that only Loren is a professional artist (CleverMill.com, BlastMyMusic.com, etc.), I think we did pretty well. The finished products were both beautiful and delicious! It was almost a shame to eat them. But of course we did.

- Mike (& Corinne)

NJ to Seattle to Trout Lake

Our East/West flight for the holidays this year was out of Seattle (rather than Portland), so we got an opportunity on the return trip to spend a brief time in Seattle visiting Corinne's family before heading back to our own homestead. Despite only being in town for 1.5 days, we managed to see quite a few people over dinner and breakfast.

 

Before too long, it was time for us to make the drive back home. But we were fortunate to have with us Corinne's brother Loren and his girlfriend Amy, who were visiting from Tulsa and decided to spend a few days with us in Trout Lake.

We took the Eastern route from Seattle to the Gorge, which despite being slightly longer distance-wise is much more scenic and predictable - no traffic!

As long as Snoqualmie and Satus Passes are both clear of snow/ice, it's definitely the way to go. We left a little later than we had planned, so we didn't get home before dark, but watching the sun set over the plains is beautiful.

Loren and Amy only stayed for a few days before heading back up to Seattle with Leif on New Years Eve, but we enjoyed their brief visit. We had fun exploring our property and the river; preparing delicious meals; drinking hot chocolate around the fire; baking and decorating sugar cookies (see next post...); and playing Nintendo. After all, what holiday would be complete without Dr. Mario and Super Smash Brothers?

- Mike (& Corinne)

Christmas with the Twins

For the Christmas, Corinne and I are still doing the alternating year thing; one year we spend Christmas with my family, and the following year we swap and spend time with hers. This year happened to be a Daly Christmas year, so we hopped on a plane and spent a week in NJ.

But this was no ordinary year - this was our twin nieces' first Christmas! At four months old, Katya and Nadija aren't quite old enough to really enjoy the holiday, but they sure are old enough to monopolize it! Neither is mobile yet; you always know where they are, because you put them there. But they are really great kids, and aside from Katya's occasional scream-fest for no good reason, they are generally happy just to be with people.

There's no question - Drew and Michelle certainly have their hands full with those two. So when Drew asked if we would watch them for a night when we were visiting while he and Michelle took a night "off" to go to dinner with friends and spend some time by themselves, we were more than happy to help. It also gave us more of an opportunity to get to know them better (as much as you can know a 4 month old). We had a good time taking them for a walk around the neighborhood, which the warm weather afforded us. And somehow, thanks to Grandma and Grandad, we never had to change a diaper!

Aside from the kids, the holidays this year were actually pretty relaxing. We spent lots of time with family, but managed to avoid the trap of too much traveling which historically has resulted in the type of vacations that you need to take a vacation from. The weather on the East Coast was unseasonably warm, and the lack of snow was actually a bit disappointing. To us it doesn't quite feel like the holidays without a bit of the white stuff.

So it was back to the West Coast with us, taking with us the bounty of the Christmas haul, including: a homemade "sock monster" from my Aunt Anita, seen in the photo at right; a FoodSaver vacuum sealer for all of that great summer produce; a pair of log tongs (hey, we're tree farmers!); a book on animal tracks, so we can identify who is roaming our property (and eating our garden); and several calories derived from my cousin Beverly's homemade fruitcake, whose ingredients were purported to cost $70!

That reminds me... I promised to post our "Favorite Recipes of 2006"!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Three Days Without Power

As if recent flooding wasn't enough, Mother Nature decided to throw another big storm our way, this time with high winds in addition to the rain. The storm came in on Thursday, and we had repeated brown-outs for about an hour before we lost power altogether at 9:30pm. So, we brought out the candles, oil lamps and flashlights and read for a few hours before setting the kitchen timer as an alarm clock and heading to bed.

The next morning the power was still out, but there was still enough hot water for both of us to have hot showers. While our heating system is propane-based, even the propane furnace requires electricity for the igniter, so heat was out. Thankfully the house is pretty well insulated and the outdoor temperature was fairly warm (30s), so the house temperature was still in the lower 60s in the morning. Before heading to work we thought it would be wise to check the "emergency hotline" number to determine whether the office was even open; we didn't know the extent of the outage. Picking up our home phone, we discovered that there was no dial-tone; we figured ice must have downed a telephone pole. So we then turned to our cellphone, only to discover that it, too, was out; the local cell tower must also be without power! So not only did we not have a way to see if work was open, we had no way to contact anyone. Without power or heat at home, we decided to head towards work anyway.

On our way to work, we ran into our next obstacle: road closed. Highway 141, the main North/South road between Trout Lake and the Columbia River, was closed for about 5 miles, and those 5 miles just happened to be right about where our house is. We later discovered that a large number of trees and power poles came down on the road along this section of the road. As luck would have it, there was a detour in place around the closure; if any other section of road was affected, there would be no detours available. So we took the detour and continued on to work.

Photo courtesy of White Salmon Enterprise

Arriving at work, we encountered our final obstacle: all of White Salmon, where our office is, was without power. Trees dropped large branches or just snapped in half, like the one on the left. The neighboring town of Bingen, however was not affected. Since Insitu actually occupies seven different buildings throughout White Salmon and Bingen, we head down to the main office in Bingen, found the first open work areas, and did what we could to be productive.

After a short and reasonably unproductive day at work, we headed into Portland with some friends to a previously scheduled dinner and Messiah sing-along. By the time we got home that night, it was after midnight, and by this point the house was in the 50s. We got a fire going in the woodstove (the fire Gods were smiling upon us that night - it started quickly and on the first attempt). By this point we had heard local news reports that stated the "PUD (Public Utility District) had no estimates for restoring power to Trout Lake", so we prepared for the long haul. In order to keep the fire going through the night, we estimated that we would have to add wood every 2 hours, so we set the alarm on our Palm for 2 hours and went to bed.

5.5 hours later, we woke up to a cold woodstove. (Apparently, the Palm isn't loud enough to awake us.) But the fire Gods were again with us, and we soon had another roaring fire going. By this time all water was cold, and the house was 52. We cooked some oatmeal on the stove and heated up as much hot water as we could. Our company holiday party was scheduled for that night, so we coordinated with a friend in Hood River (who did have power) to shower and change beforehand. (By this time our landline phone was back, but the cellphone was still out.) But as luck would have it, at 3pm Saturday afternoon the power was restored and all could return to normal.

It's a good thing we didn't live in the next town north, which is 15 miles away; the estimate for restoring their power was upwards of another 3-4 days! We may live in the country, but there are people who live in even more remote locations than we do! In fact, the power in Trout Lake was restored earlier than to most of Corinne's family living in Seattle. I guess we "country folk" have more experience with power outages (although it probably also helps that we have several orders of magnitude fewer people.)

- Mike (& Corinne)

Decorating the Tree

On the last day of Loren's visit, after we had most of the lights on, we spent several fun hours drinking eggnog, listening to our favorite holiday tunes, and adorning our tree with ornaments.

Getting ornaments to the top of the tree turned out to be fairly tricky - the ladder only goes so far, and you have to watch out for those guide wires so as not to bring the whole tree crashing down. Through the careful use of a light bulb changer on a 16' extension pole, we managed to get enough ornaments up to the top so that it looks balanced with the bottom.

We love our tree!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Cutting Another Christmas Tree

Our tree stands were originally intended to be a Christmas tree farm. In fact, we still occasionally get mail addressed to Trout Lake Tree Farm. Of course, our trees are much too large for the average home; 20+ year old trees with 12 to 18 inches of growth each year just won't fit. (We have toyed with the idea of selling/giving trees to malls, churches, etc. who might have the space for such a tree.) But since we have to thin our trees anyway in order to give the ones that remain more space to grow, we invited our friends Dave, Jen and their daughter Ella drove out to our place to cut themselves a Christmas tree. Uh, what I mean is they came out to help us thin our stands to improve commercial harvest. That's what I meant.

We thought that the top of one of our trees could make a nice Christmas tree, so we started by felling a Douglas Fir. The tricky part, though, is that it is hard to see the top 10' of a 25 foot tree. Once we had it on the ground, it wasn't quite what they were looking for. We did some more looking and found a nice Grand Fir that needed to be thinned and fit the bill nicely. So the Douglas Fir became firewood, of course.

We're not sure how common we want this practice of allowing others to cut their Christmas trees from our place to become. Selecting a tree suitable for presentation AND also needing to be thinned requires some thought and searching; but most importantly, it requires us to be there. But at least this once it was fun!

- Mike (& Corinne)

Winter Wonderland

At 1700' elevation, Trout Lake gets a significant amount of snow each year. On the Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend, we were blanketed with about a foot of new snow! While the majority of our visitors had left by this point, Leif and Loren were still here to frolic in the snow with us.

Our first activity was the ever-popular snow angels. Loren started us off by falling backwards into the snow, but apparently he over-estimated the cushioning factor of the snow. He spent the next several minutes just lying in the snow, recovering.

The snow was the perfect consistency for packing, so our next activity was making snow "forts". Loren and I each built a snow wall to protect from the onslaught of the other, then proceeded to hurl snowballs at each other, like when we were kids. Corinne worked as an independent contractor, helping both of us build our respective forts, while Leif was a sniper whose only protection was his stealth.
Watch and listen to a video of the battle here.

And of course, we just HAD to build a snowman. But not just any snowman - we were out to build the biggest snowman we could. The snow was so perfect for it that it didn't take long to construct a base with about a 4 foot diameter. The mid-section required 3 people in order to successfully hoist it upon the base, followed soon after by the head.

We were quickly losing the light, so we rushed to add the stick arms, charcoal eyes, mouth and buttons, carrot nose, scarf, cowboy hat and snowboarding gloves. All hail our 9 foot snowman overlords!

The setting sun over our snow-laden trees provides a beautiful sight to end a fun-filled weekend.

- Mike (& Corinne)

Lighting the Tree

We started with 3 strings of lights, but with a 16'+ tree we knew that wouldn't be enough. It took 3 different trips to the store to finally have enough lights to illuminate the tree to our liking.

This tree has 12 strings of lights on it. That's right - 1200 individual lights. Hopefully it won't impact our electric bill too much.!

- Mike (& Corinne)