With the gift yesterday of the quarter of venison from Vince, I’ve spent most of the day processing the meat.  Processing: an odd term.  I’ve cut all the meat away from the bones and set the bones to cooking for soup.  I’ve cut most of the meat into chunks for either canning as stew meat or grinding into sausage.  Sausage, yum, glad I checked the spice supply back in September.  I pulled some of the pork chops out of the freezer to grind too.  I’ve got enough to do some Hunters Sausage and breakfast sausage.  The meat is still bleeding out, so I won’t can anything until tomorrow and by then the soup should be ready too. It sure does smell good in here with the soup cooking; onions and garlic are some of my favorite cooking aromas!

As I cut the meat, I got to thinking about this turn of events.  Vince really surprised me.  Carolyn surprised me too.  Although she agreed not to tell anyone, she picked the right one to tell, knowing it just might turn him around, and it did.  I just might have an ally now.  I wonder what he said to her that prompted the disregard for the confidentiality.

Temperatures are rising a bit, but the sky is still heavy.  Hard to tell if it’s going to rain or snow.  At this point it would be better if it snowed.  I recall one year we didn’t get the blanket of snow early enough in the season, but it was bitter cold.  Without that snow, the frost line went deep, six feet deep, and all the water and sewer lines in town broke.  It was a mess!  My lines are only four feet down, but that seems to be enough for here.  I need to run the generator in the morning and pump some water, keep those lines moving.  Might be a good time to do a load of laundry too; I’ll have to set up the drying rack next to the stove.

I noticed something this morning as I got up:  I’m sleeping better.  I still wake easily, as I’ve always been ultra-sensitive to sounds, but now ALL the sounds are nature sounds.  There’s no traffic on the main road; there’s no refrigerator cycling; and there’s no hum to the clock.  I’m wondering if it isn’t the sounds, but the absence of electricity – that constant hum and discharge of power.  Either way, I’m sleeping thru the night now.