Sunday, December 4, 2011

One of those great days :-)

Nothing special until late afternoon when a friend came over and the two of us drove a short distance from our farm to find a group of short-eared owls that migrate south to our part of SE Michigan each winter. We knew we had found the owls when we found a group of ~20 cars lined up along the road and 20+ people lining the road's edge all holding their binoculars up. This was a first or 'lifer' for me. What a thrill to see several of these beautiful big birds (I saw 4 different ones) hunting at dusk over the open fields. They were not close, but we still got decent views. I'm tempted to go back again and again to soak in the joy of seeing them weaving back and forth approx 3-4 feet over the fields. However, even with all my straw bale moving to get the garlic mulched, my upper arms were sore this morning when waking up. I guess different muscles are used to continuously hold up those binoculars. So the logical conclusion -to me- is that I must need more birding to strengthen those muscles, too!

Here is a link to see the short-eared owl.

Next up was supper, again nothing special until we tasted the sauce/dip I made to spice up our cooked brussels sprouts, which I made by mixing an equal amount of the 'garlic exilir' recipe from my previous post with some blue cheese crumbles (about 1 heaping Tbsp. each) with some olive oil to blend it all together just using a fork to smash and stir. My husband's eyes got wide and I saw him licking his fork (maybe even his finger?) saying something like 'This is AMAZING!' Yes, I had to agree. We ate all the sauce I made last night, but there are still more ingredients to make it again for something else - easy as pie, actually much easier than making pie!

Last, I found and pulled out all of our University of Wisconsin flags, blankets, t-shirts, and other UW 'gear' collected over the years to make it clear who we were cheering for in last night's first Big Ten Championship Football Game against Michigan State University. I am a life-long Badger fan, finally getting to UW-Madison for my graduate degree and dietetic internship, most of that time (decades in fact!) being happy enough to be on the short-end of the 62-0 type of scores. Garrison Keillor likes to say that type of team 'builds character' for the team, the students, and even the State, and maybe it does, but winning is nice, too. :-) I had to struggle to stay awake for the entire game, so it was a good thing UW finally woke me up at the end of the 4th quarter by decisively coming alive to win the game.  On to the Rose Bowl! U-rah-rah Wiscooonsin!

A good day, a very good day, even a very special day. :-)

Now on to Christmas tree shopping. We do things like this when we can't be out in our own wet fields to finish putting the farm to bed for the winter because, guess what!, it's raining again, raining, raining, and raining some more. However, even with the rain (our pond is now officially overflowing), we'll have a very good day.

I hope you enjoy your day, too!

"Cultivate your life - you are what you grow - inch by inch, row by row"

Diana Dyer, MS, RD

2 comments:

Kateri said...

Do these owls come out when it is still light, usually? I just looked at the interactive map of sightings and see that there have been year round sightings in the area between Jackson and Stockbridge. I don't know my owls at all, but have a few times seen an owl perched in a tree as I was driving down 106. (Don't know what kind of owl.)

Kim R. said...

U-rah-rah! Imagine me singing Varsity with you too! I'm now thinking I really need to try that garlic exilir . . . blue cheese eh?