Okay, this morning we had......

3/4 " thick ice on all the animal troughs, now that's scary! The hoses are also frozen as well as one outside faucet, so back to hauling water in 5 gallon buckets already*sigh* The temp. this morning at 6:30am was 18F, Brrrrr..... The chili sauce turned out great with some tweaking, we don't like it to hot( spicy) and we made a huge pot of chili and still canned 8 pints of sauce, YEAH! As Mike was heading out the door to work this morning, it's his weekend, he quietly said, "Come here." Out in the garden were two deer, I thought one looked like it was a spike( buck), but as they both trotted off, we saw that they both were spikes. This triggered a memory from a few summers ago of a skinny, scruffy looking doe who came and ate lettuce from our garden. She NEVER bothered anything else, so feeling a bit sorry for her condition let her graze on the 50ft row of lettuce, besides it grows right back*wink* Several weeks went by and she got accustom to our comings and goings and would eat with us as close as 25 ft. I thought she probably had a fawn hidden close by and later in the summer we finally saw her in the bottom of our pasture( she'd hid them in the brush and small trees down there) with not one, but twin fawns. Now after this morning I wonder if maybe these aren't those fawns? It's nice to have these memories to ponder, and especially enjoy the wildlife, now that gardening is over, LOL! On today's schedule apples! We have a bushel basket of apples picked off the ground and some that were damaged are getting soft, so.... we NEED to take care of them promptly. I'm thinking sauce and a crock pot of butter from these apples. We'll can more pie filling from the good apples picked off the trees. I'm running low on quart jars and down to the last 3 dozen pint jars as well. A few years back we'd roughly counted our jar supply and all total( qts. and pts.) we had a little over 1,000 and last season our neighbor gave us several boxes of pints. I do have a few boxes in the loft of the garage, but many of those are mayonaise jars and such, so not good for pressure canning. They do work okay for water bathing though. Since this head cold hit, I've been somewhat sluggish and today I'm just feeling plain ole' lazy, LOL! I do feel better and even my nose has cleared but...... Do you ever have those days where you'd just like to curl up with a book, write a few letters or just take a nap? That is how I've been feeling and even though Mike has encouraged me to take it easy, the produce won't wait until I'm feeling 100%, so we whittle away at it each day. The tomatoes( remember we had 2 bushel baskets and a milk crate full of green maters) they are down to 1 bushel basket and ripening at a nice pace. We find enough ripened for a big enough batch, every other day. We still have 6 heads of cabbage on the front porch to make into freezer slaw, but alas have to wait to dig carrots to finish that job. Once all this produce is taken care of, then Cortney and I have plans to get Jon's old bedroom converted to a spare/ craft/ sewing room. We each have projects planned for Christmas gifts, but need a place where we can work and then just leave it, without having to clean it up and put it away to eat supper. This is going to be so nice to have, but it is going to require cleaning up a bit, getting rid of an old computer desk( was Jon's but he didn't need it) and repainting, over his camouflaged wall. Okay this is turning into a rambling, I think I'll fetch myself a cup of hot tea and read for a bit in my book, The Diary of Mattie Spenser by Sandra Dallas. I was in search of a new author, I get in ruts, and found this ladies books. I bought two, the first was entitled; The Persian Pickle Club and it was pretty good for fiction. The Diary of Mattie Spenser is not a fiction, but rather taken from a real diary of a woman who traveled to CO via wagon and her experiences on the new frontier. There are portions of the book not appropriate enough for Cortney to read, referring to marital duties, U-hum, otherwise it is a delightful book. Thanks for stopping in and may your weekend be wonderful!