It’s been a pretty cold March overall. This is the first time we’ve hit seventies in the shade. First day this year I’ve opened the cabin windows.
And I’m loving it. Warm wind makes me think maybe we’re actually creeping up on Spring at last.
Every year I spend most of the winter sitting around being grumpy. I want my fun desert back. Today after Monday morning water run I tried to do something a little – a tiny bit – creative…
A week ago I got a pound of millet, in hopes of doing something different with my bread. Millet is this round little grain, like #12 birdshot. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Grinding it seemed kind of unnecessary, if it was even possible. One online recipe said soak it, another said toast it and that sounded better. Toasted millet smells good – and it stays crunchy throughout the bake, though not danger-to-teeth crunchy. I had warm millet-and-wheatflour bread for lunch and it was really good, but not startlingly different from usual.
Once I had the dishes washed and put away it began to dawn on me what a beautiful day I was spending indoors. I cast around for something useful to do outdoors other than walking back and forth to the chickens, and remembered that horribly dirty jacket that’s been out on the porch for three weeks…
I have a couple of light jackets but this is my favorite because it’s easy on/off and so ragged I literally don’t care what gets smeared on it. But by the end of February it had become so horrible with stove soot that it was an active danger to the one piece of indoor furniture capable of being ruined by soot. I exiled it to the porch because it’s too bulky to wash in the sink, in hope that someday a mild enough day would come that I could tub-wash it. Today was finally its day.
But first I had to deal with the yard spigot…
My well water is damn near a thousand PPM dissolved solids, mostly calcium and iron oxide. After five months of no water running through it, that really shows up in the winter-inactive plumbing. So the first thing I have to do every Spring before I can use the spigot is let it run for several minutes until it runs clear. Normally I hook up the yard hose and let the water run into a ditch for 10-15 minutes, but this time I got impatient because I wanted to fill a laundry tub, and ended up lugging the tub back and forth to the ditch until the water was clear enough to wash a terminally-filthy jacket without making things worse. So that’s out of the way as well.
Not quite porch-sittin’ weather, but by far the nicest day in over five months.
Great to see you up and about! I knew Spring was here when the last of the snow melted off the yard to reveal a field of buttercups (they bloom under the snow, don’t as me how). And my wife saw a robin the other day…
64 high here today. Forecast says 20 low in two nights. Yay, not the kinda cold that kills you immediately!
Millet is birdseed or OK breakfast cereal depending what you do to it. Enjoy the warm, Joel!
Fun Fact: Millet was the reason that Americans in the 1950’s and 60’s thought parakeets only lived about five years, even though it was observed for a long time that wild Australian parakeets actually lived a good deal longer than that even through all the dangers of the outback.
When people started breeding small broadbeak birds in captivity, they looked around for what they ate and settled on millet because broadbeaks would ignore any other food if presented with millet. They kind of jumped to the conclusion that this meant millet was the perfect food for small birds, and for decades millet was sold as ‘birdseed.” Turns out this was the equivalent of giving babies a steady diet of candy bars and wondering why they never survive past their teens.
Huh. I had no idea. Thanks for the info! We had a quaker parrot for years- a steady diet of candy bars would explain a lot about the little varmint’s behaviour. (Full disclosure: I would wake from a nap to find the little noise maker had escaped his cage and was asleep on my chest. I almost miss him.)
Being grumpy is my elderly state of being more often than not in winter, but the season will turn.
I could almost smell the bread.