One Year Ago, photo

A week ago, Himself and I drove to III for the day hoping to find snow like this in the picture. We wanted to try out the cross country skis again. Wanted to practice our stops and turns (without Craig there providing motivation with M80s and firecrackers!)
Unfortunately what snow there had been was melting and soon it was all gone. We didn't get to practice. Instead we cut trees and brush out of the fence line. Gosh, that's a toss up -- which would we rather do? Ski? or clear fence line?
Meanwhile, the weather forecasters were predicting a storm at home, midweek, so we brought the skis home with us thinking we might get to use them Wednesday or Thursday here in town. Nope. No way. We scared the storm away and if it snowed at all, it just flurried.
So if you ever need to ward off a snow storm, call us. We'll send in the SNOW BUSTERS . . . our cross country skis.

Two Years Ago . . .

And just to rub salt in the wound, there was this much snow in February 2007. We could have skied on this snow!

Over the river and through the woods . . .

There's still a few of these turn of the century bridges around (that's the turn of the 20th century -- 1900ish). This one is in Decatur County, Ia and there is a sign up warning that this is a one lane bridge. Well, it isn't very wide, that is for sure, but two cars can pass on this bridge if they are both careful. Maybe you wouldn't want to share the bridge with a semi, tho!

We used to see these bridges all over Iowa and the midwest but there are fewer and fewer of them.

Look at that pretty blue sky!

Cross country skiing . . .

. . . not! We had 6" of snow in Creston this past week so we hoped we had that much at III. Sunday morning we got up in good time and headed south as we wanted to practice our turns and stops on the skis. The further south we went, we knew we wouldn't be skiing this weekend but we still wanted to check on the cabin and knew we'd find something to do.

Sure enough, there was some snow here and there but not enough for good skiing and sure enough, we found something to do . . . although it wasn't nearly the fun of skiing.

Instead Himself used the chainsaw and I followed along behind with the loppers and we started clearing the north fence line. I'd been through there before, with the loppers -- but we needed the big gun, the chain saw. We worked for a good hour and more and gained maybe a hundred yards . . . but there's several hundred more yards to go. We'll get at it again, one of these years . . .

Tastes Great

After working outside in the 35-40 degree range and working up an appetite, this canned soup and a sandwich hit the spot. It warmed us up and revived us.

The inside cabin temperature was about 31 degrees at 9:30. By the time we sat down to lunch, our little cast iron stove and a few pieces of firewood, had the cabin at a toasty 68 degrees. Once we get the stove up to temperature, we have to be really careful because from 68 to 85 or 90 is just one log too many!

Contest! My first Contest!

To the first person who can tell me what this object is, I am going to give a Hersey Bar! (Plain or with almonds, your choice! woohooo!) LOL I'm a far cry from the Pioneer Woman! Traci and Kristy, do you ever read the Pioneer Woman? http://thepioneerwoman.com/

SKI BUMS

We went to Shag III after it snowed to try out our new cross country skis for the first time. Herself has always wanted to do this so she forced me to also want to do it. Although the temp is about 40 degrees, there is still about 3 inches of snow with ice under the snow. We put our skis on, latched onto our ski poles, and carefully got up and slowly made our way up to where we thought it would be reasonably safe to slowly start our way back down. WELL, we got turned around and SLOWLY started back down towards the cabin. All went well until we tried to stop, and both of us went to the ground." WOW, that was fun" we said as we tried to pick ourselves up!! And back up we went, and back down we went. Then we tried one of our trails. This kind of had me worried, as the trails are narrow, and there would be alot of turning. WELL, there was no turning, we hadn't mastered that yet, we either had to fall, or crash into trees, both of which we did quite well.
SO, I can see that this might be fun someday, after my tailbone heals, and i'm sure once we master turning and stopping, it will be much safer. Thank goodness no one was taking movies of this. This is February 11, 2009. I've just heard we are supposed to get 6-8 inches of snow Friday, so we maybe heading down Saturday, depending on the weather, and try again. As long as we suffer no broken bones, all will be well.
Boi