Cop Car's Beat

Snowing & Blowing - redux

When I returned to bed at about 2:30am, today, there was a lot of thunder and lightning and rain and wind - and the temperature had fallen from 36 degrees (F) to 32 degrees (F) during the hour or two that I had been up - but, when Hunky Husband and I arose about 30 minutes ago, we were greeted by the forecasted snowing and blowing. Until late last night, I expected pretty much a repeat of the snow that we had received two weeks ago; but, just before I went to bed, the forecasters made it clear that, although the maps they were showing us of the different bands of snow depths expected closely mirrored the predictive maps of two weeks ago, this snow won't stick around for as long a time. The temperatures aren't expected to be as low.

Because of the wind, I chose to take photographs through our double-glazed windows rather than sliding the breakfast room door open. The quality of the photos suffers for it, but I didn't hear HH saying, "Shut the door!" I cannot explain the difference in color values on the snow of the first photo and the other two photos, but each photo was snapped through a different window. The first photo is pretty much down-wind looking at the area from which the big old cottonwood tree was removed in November.

The second photo shows the lea side of the house. A female Northern Cardinal is atop one of the birdfeeder poles. One of the Slate-colored Juncos on the ground is near a bush in the photo. The orange electrical cord at the bottom left is the power feed to the heated bird bath.

The viewing axis of the last photo is nearly perpendicular to the wind, as the neighbor's flags indicate.

In the above photo, the neighbor's tree silhouettes are missing one of their big old cottonwood trees. After our last snow, the neighbors had a tree removed. I assume that it had lost branches during that snowstorm and that more of the large limbs were a threat, possibly falling onto the house if the tree remained. Unfortunately, the photo that I had posted showing the flags following the last snowstorm did not extend far enough to the right (northeast) for comparison.

We are forecasted to receive a total of 6" - 9" of snow. I did think, last evening, to fill the bird bath with clean water and to take the "insides" out of the rain gage. The rain gage looks like we had already received about 1.5"-2" of snow when we arose. I have a medical appointment (draw blood for lipid panel, et cetera) that I may call to re-schedule, this morning. I don't really want all of the sugar from the upcoming snow ice cream to throw off my blood glucose reading ;  ) I notice that the snowflakes are now larger than they were when I snapped the above photos. The following photo shows some of the large flakes that have stuck to a kitchen window, but the falling of large flakes didn't last long. The snowfall quickly went back to small flakes. It's hard for large flakes to survive the wind.

One of those days

I just returned from my trip to the butcher's shop, preparing for another spate of hunkering down with ice and snow. Mostly, I don't include meats in my order to the grocery store (for pick up) because I don't have enough trust in their shoppers to let them substitute if the store is out of whatever it was that I ordered. Today, for our hunkering down, I particularly wanted to buy a beef roast. Right.

My shopping at Sig's, today, was more pleasant than my previous foray. The co-owner was working (the only worker in the shop while I was there) and there were no other customers in the store. I timed my trip to make the chances of having other shoppers present minimized. I double-mask to go inside, but the workers and customers on-the-whole, do not.  Anne, the co-owner with her son (Sig, her husband, having died about 15 years ago) told me that she had to come back to work because they had been unable to find reliable help. I understand that. The last time I was there, several weeks/months ago, there were three men working - one butcher and two counter servers - none of whom I had seen, before. (There was a reason for that: Not one of them had been employed there for more than a couple of weeks, and the guy who waited on me said that it was his first day on the job.) 

Moving right along...this (below) is the treasure trove with which I returned home.

Hmm...let's see, now...taking inventory I find two 1.5-pound packages of ground Chuck, one hunk of frozen salmon, one package of pork loin, one package of young fryer chicken (that probably won't get fried since HH thinks that any fried chicken that isn't "extra crispy" from KFC can't be worth eating), and a pint container of ambrosia (a dab of fruit and shredded coconut with a whole lot of whipped cream) that HH will devour. What? No beef roast? Oh, yes. Instant flashback photo in my mind tells me that there were a lot of various steaks in the display case, but no roast. Drat! As it turned out, I should not have worried. In placing some of the packages in the downstairs freezer, I found this package (below) - "Beef Top Round Steak" that will substitute nicely for a beef roast. Note that it was packaged on November 16, 2020. It's about time that it be used.

Why did I need beef roast in the first place? Because Roberta X has, unknown to her, "talked me into" trying something that my mother couldn't get me to try after decades of pleading - parsnips.

As a child, age 8 or 10, I remember sitting at the dinner table (actually, our only table) dejectedly staring at the parsnips on my plate. The odor off of that root vegetable turned my stomach. I was forced by my (truly) loving parents to consume them - after which I promptly went to the bathroom to barf them up. I caught holy heck from my folks. but have never knowingly eaten parsnips since that day. 

Enter Roberta X of The Adventures of Roberta X. If you've never read her blog, Roberta is a techie who occasionally writes about her cooking adventures - such as here, here, or here. Those adventures frequently (as in the previously linked postings) feature parsnips. OK, Roberta. I'm going to give parsnips another try. It has only been 74 years (at least) since my last trial. Mother would be proud.

I think I have enough root veggies (below) to make a decent try at it. Having Idaho potatoes, sweet potato, onions, turnips, parsnips, tiny carrots, and radishes on hand, I may pare it down to just three or four of them.

 

Wandering far away

I have been exploring some of the websites with links included in my Typelist 4 FUN & ENLIGHTENMENT, mostly to assure that the links are still active. I found a short video from NASA to share.

From the Hubble page, I present the following:

On The Shoulders of a Giant

In 1675, famed physicist and mathematician, Isaac Newton, penned a letter to his contemporary and rival, polymath Robert Hooke. In that letter, Newton writes what would become one of his most famous remarks: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Over time, this simple statement has come to represent the process of science itself, each new discovery building upon previous work. The same is true for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and its observing partner, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

Since its 1990 launch, the Hubble Space Telescope has given humanity a unique perspective of the universe. From its vantage point above Earth’s light-distorting atmosphere, Hubble has provided us with clear, detailed views that reach farther out in space and further back in time than any of its predecessors. Hubble’s observations have charted the evolution of galaxies, stars, nebulae, comets, the outer planets, and their moons. Hubble’s discoveries have confirmed the existence of black holes in galaxy cores, measured the composition of exoplanet atmospheres, found the most distant galaxies to date, and verified the accelerating expansion of the universe – a 2011 Nobel Prize winning discovery in physics. Hubble’s findings have affected all aspects of astronomy, prompting further research and revisions to textbooks, but its observations have captured more than our scientific curiosity. Today we find Hubble’s iconic images on lunchboxes, coffee mugs, socks, neckties, and even moving vans. For more than 30 years, Hubble has spurred our imaginations, inspiring our desire to learn more. To do that, we need to see farther and deeper.

Note: The viewing experience of the following video is more satisfactory from the NASA page instead of viewing the embedded version, below or on YouTube. For some reason, I can't get away from double captioning in either of the latter versions.

Caught unawares

Our snow fell Wednesday and Thursday (February 2 & 3). Hunky Husband kept thinking that he saw footsteps in our back yard. My assessment was that he was seeing patterns in the snow caused by drifting. There was, after all, wind accompanying the snowfall for the last 20 hours or so, causing minor drifting. However, this morning when I went to the kitchen to prepare our lunch, I caught sight of the evidence of a massive invasion. The photo, below, shows the tracks of about 18 invaders - Wild Turkeys. We missed seeing them, this time, but they come down the street each morning, cutting through our yard to access the creek. The return journey is generally made each evening. I can only assume they had been hunkered down, as any reasonable turkey should have been, the previous two days.

The following photo shows how minor the drifting was against Adam's fence.

The force of the wind can be guestimated to be about 12 miles/hour by looking at the flags across the street from us.

ADDITION of 2/6/2022 - Attractions for birds

Partial Week in Review - February 2, 2022

Monday - Started off with a bang rattle

At about 11am, standing at the kitchen sink cleaning veggies, I heard the dishes in the cabinets rattle. The rattling pulsed for a total of about 22 seconds.

Other than the earthquake and a bit of cooking, my day was taken up finishing up the watering of trees and lawn (oh, and a bit of leaf raking). The weekend had provided us mild weather, allowing me to strike out against our drought conditions by watering newish trees and grass. I'm assuming that, although we have had temperatures in the single digits in November-January, the grass has not gone into dormancy since about 50% of it is still green. So far, the local water companies have not levied restrictions on water use, but we've had a total of less than 3/4-inch precipitation in the past three months, so I let established trees and plants fend for themselves.

Tuesday - Adventurous cooking

Tuesday is our preferred grocery pickup day. I had ordered two 1/2-gallon containers of milk and a 4-ounce bottle of vanilla extract to assure that we had sufficient ingredients for the snow ice cream I expected to enjoy. We were smack in the middle of the band of Kansas forecasted to receive 6-9 inches of snow, Wednesday and Thursday.

Among the items we brought home from the grocery store was a package of thick, boneless pork chops. I had really wanted lamb chops, but Dillons had none on hand and I didn't feel like making a run to Sig's butcher shop. I decided to try a new recipe (below) for making lamb chops, on the pork chops. (I don't recall the name of the source of the page shown. It was an unsolicited advertising publication.)

Girding my loins, I dived into making the chops for lunch. Immediately, I had to make a substitution - the only lemon on hand was not suitable and I didn't consider a lime to be a good substitute, so I used balsamic vinegar. Other than that, I followed the above recipe, using HH's 2019 Georges-Dubɶuf Beaujolais-Villages, his pre-dinner wine. It was a lovely meal, each chop complemented with a really small baked potato (with sour cream) and fresh cherry tomatoes.

ADDITION of a few hours later, because I forgot to include it the first time.

This is what the pork chops looked like while being cooked.

Wednesday - The white stuff came & Hair today, gone tomorrow

Snow: As usual, not being a good sleeper, I arose for a couple of hours in the early hours of Wednesday. It was snowing. It wasn't heavy, it wasn't blowing, it hadn't accumulated very much. By mid-morning, the wind had come up and although it didn't appear that we had received much snow, it had drifted a little. Our rain gage had trapped about four or five inches of snow. My attempt to take photos were met with a "Battery too low to take photos" message. The photos, below, were taken at about Noon. In the first photo, the rain gage is shown with the snow trapped inside. (I had removed the "funnel" and "measuring tube" to allow snow entry.) At 9pm, the depth of the snow in the rain gage was 8.5".

The second photo shows a pan of snow scooped up from the back porch for my Noon-time dish of ice cream. Each meal, that day, comprised a bowl of snow ice cream. Yum!

The snow was a skier's delight - dry powder. Fortunately, despite the wind, the snow is clean. It is late enough in the season that leaves and bits have already fallen from most trees. The snowfall was preceded by very light rain (think Seattle rain) for a few hours, knocking the dirt particles from the air and off of the trees. The snow kept well because the temperature was in the high teens (Fahrenheit).

Hair: (Important stuff - there will be a test - oh, yea.) The history of my life includes eras during which my hair was long, and eras during which it was short. Only because I could not maintain a schedule (from lack of proximity or lack of money) of having my hair cut often enough did I wander into a few weeks' time of wearing medium length hair - and during the two years that I lived in humid Florida. I wore long hair until age 14, short hair from then to age 31, long hair from then to age 57, short hair until COVID-19 made me too chicken to go to the hair cutting shop. It takes about one year for my hair to grow out so, now after two years in which to grow, my hair is long, again.

Early in the process of letting my hair grow out this time, and recalling that my Great-grandmother S wore her long hair up in a bun, I consulted Wonderful GrandDaughter (WGD) and Rachie. Being nurses, they have tended to wear their long tresses up in buns for the past several years. They are talented at making it look effortless, neat, and attractive. How did they do it? They told me. I practiced. I could never get the hang of it - until this past week. I got it! My bun looked effortless, neat, and mostly tidy. To memorialize the event and to be able to send them evidence of my feat (I cannot see them in person, after all), I had a passport-type photo taken at our local Walgreens (below). What an eye-opener. I shuddered looking at the too-honest photo. Obviously, WGD and Rachie looked wonderful in their buns because they are young and good-looking. Who would have thought?

I used the above photo to update the photo at the top of the blog page for a couple of days; but, Wednesday, I did something that I had not really been able to do, before. I took a selfie. It shows me with my hair down (below) and conforms more to the mental image I hold of myself. I may never be able to wear my hair "up", again!

Writing that last sentence reminded me that my mother had worn her hair in an "up-do" for some years in the 1940s and 1950s and that I had worn mine in an "up-do" on special occasions (photos of each, below). Had I remembered the photos of my own up-do in 1969, I might have been spared the trauma of going through my more recent up-do attempts. I must admit that the 1969 up-do had looked a lot better before the Kansas winds assaulted it.

  

                                                                                                                        December 1969