Stocking Up on Stock

Every fall, we are entertained by one of the resident squirrels as it stocks up for winter by stashing pine nuts in the woodshed. (This is a horrible picture, but I took it from inside the house so as not to scare it away.)

This has happened every year since we built our house (in 1996), which makes this a multi-generational squirrel tradition. The squirrel spends most of September and October running back and forth between a couple of trees collecting nuts, then takes them to the woodshed. Occasionally, it will detour and run up on top of the woodpile or one of the husband’s work trailers. Once in a while, it even comes up on the porch. Lila sits and watches from the kitchen door. We refer to this as Squirrel TV.

The husband and I were busy yesterday, too. I canned 19 pints of chicken stock:

We took more stuff out to the storage container and rearranged a few things here in the house. He moved the freezer that had been on the porch to the old garage, which freed up space for the garden bench I bought. It’ll go out to the garden next spring, but we’ll store it here on the porch over the winter.

He stained the fence around the propane tanks and the porta-potty that were hit by a large tree limb during that horrible windstorm in March. The tree limb took out the porta-potty—which still has to be repaired—and several of the fence slats. He replaced the fence slats a few months ago and gave the entire fence a coat of stain yesterday.

I finished the insulated shades for the living room (hallelujah). There is a small piece of insulated material left, enough to make a shade for the window in the door in the laundry room. I’m going to watch for another 50% or 60% off coupon at Joanns and get enough of the insulated shade material to do the other eight windows this winter. The shades look so much nicer than the curtains I had up there before, nice enough that they are worth the hassle of making them.

He and I plan to dig up the rest of the potatoes this afternoon and that will be it for the garden.

We’re getting down to the wire with wedding preparations. The kids arrive a week from today, followed by the rest of the relatives. DD#1 very helpfully put together a timeline of events for each day of wedding week showing who needs to be where doing what. The big jobs we needed to do are done. Now it’s mostly a matter of staying on top of all the little details.

Blog posts may be few and far between next week as a result, but we’ll see how things go.