Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

   Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. It's my favorite holiday. I think it's appropriate to take at least one day of the year and give thought to our many blessings, and thank God for them. It's also the one day of the year when a person can get away with eating massive amounts of delicious food and not feel too guilty about it.   Like many households in America, we had turkey for dinner. One of my sons-in-law wanted ham as well, and since he donated one, we cooked it also. Of course there was all the trimmings to go with the meat- green bean casserole, candied yams with marshmallows, cranberry sauce, deviled eggs, stuffing, mashed potatoes, cranberry Jello salad with cream cheese, a relish tray and of course pie. Pumpkin and apple both.    Even though there were eleven people at my table, our stomachs can only hold so much at one sitting. That means leftovers. I don't mind leftovers for a day or two, but we still have turkey in the refrigerator, and frankl...

  I took this picture last month before we got any snow- obviously.  It's been a kind of slow time as far as writing a post goes. Nothing too exciting happening in my life, which I guess I should be glad about. We did have the power go out four times in the past few weeks. Once because of heavy snow, once because of a transformer catching fire and once because of the wind I suppose. The last time I have no idea why it went out, it just did. Unfortunately, all that power surging and fluctuation caused my garage door opener to quit working. I tried to reset it, following the directions on the back, but that didn't work. Then I watched a video that showed the same things that the back of the opener said, but that didn't work either, so now I have no recourse but to call someone and pay big bucks to either get it fixed or buy a new one. What a hassle. Of course none of that has anything to do with the moose that came to visit last month. My friends Patty and Butch had just come...

   On September 6th this year I sent a package to my friend Buffalo Bob Holden in Townshend Vermont. I sent it media rate, since it had a book and and a CD in it, and that's the cheapest way to send it. I fully expected it to take a few weeks to get to him. Since I don't pay the full price of first class mail, which would be roughly twice the amount or more than media mail, I expect it to take longer. However, what I didn't expect was that it would take two months and ten days to arrive. Fortunately, there is a tracking number on the package that allows me to see the progress of the package. To say the least, if this package was eligible for airline miles, it could probably take a trip to Europe and back with miles to spare. One other time I had sent Buffalo a similar package- media rate. That one also took over six weeks as I recall, perhaps longer. When he asked his postmaster about that one, the guy mentioned that along the way it had been delivered to several distributi...

  I made muffins again the other night. If you're a buffoon, I could make muffoons, but they wouldn't  taste as good.  The church board was supposed to meet at our house on Tuesday because Jan can't see to drive at night, and though I can kind of see in the dark, why take a chance on wrecking the car to go to a church board meeting? If I'm going to wreck the car, I'd rather it be because of something exciting. Anyway, it was decided that everyone would come over here instead. Wanting to be a good host, and of course wanting to expand my already voluminous belly, I opted to make some muffins for our guests. It's a recipe that I've written about before, involving sour cream and blueberries. As expected, they turned out really, really good.  If you follow the recipe, it's amazing how well your product turns out. What a concept. It just so happens that Tuesday it started to snow. I mentioned to Jan that they might cancel the meeting, but it wasn't until ...