we’ve got the snowblower by the back door.
Jane is baking an apple pie with a recipe that involves whiskey.
We could accumulate 8″ over the next few days, and OSG could get more than that, living a couple of hundred feet higher.
For those of you in the snowless south, it works like this: you figure the weather report, and you look at the elevation at which it will snow, versus rain: when it gets to 2000 feet, we tend to get snowed on. There’s a hill over by the airport: it would be raining at our old apartment, but then if you drove to the airport it would be snowing as you got to the hilltop. Here, we live on a hill, and past us it only gets higher.
Conversely, they threaten you with snow, but it says elevation 4000 feet, which means only the top of Mt. Spokane gets dusted, way up there, but you’re going to get rained on.
And snow here is so neat. In Oklahoma, when it snows, everything gets covered and it blows in drifts; but in Spokane wind is not a constant, and when I first moved here, the sight of neat green-grass circles around all the trees was puzzling until I realized that in Spokane weather does not blow sideways: it falls gently straight down, and the evergreen branches were holding all the snow.
Life without a perpetual 20-30 mile wind going is just different.
Wanna swap? Windy, as usual.
I’m curious how the whiskey is applied. Before or after baking? To the pie or to the cook or to the guests? Heheheh, enjoy the pie, it sounds great.
Lol, Tulrose!
The whiskey goes into the filling mix, but Jane decided to use Spiced Rum. Our regular whiskey is single malt and our Scottish ancestors would have a wee fuss at us for using it in cooking.
Phew. I’m glad you corrected that misunderstanding. It sounds like a great recipe but some things are sacred 🙂
There’s a reason some people blend whiskeys and cooking is probably it 😀
My normal tipple is Glenfiddich but I keep a bottle of Glenmorangie for special occasions(*).
(*)When the Glenfiddich has run out 🙂
Our favorites are the Balvenie, Glenkinchie, and Highland Park; and the inexplicably lower priced Dalmore; and I was very fond of Glen Turret, but you can’t get that in the states.
Save some pie for me, please!
I’ll be over 😀
Put raisins or currents, (soaked in the liquor), and about a cup of nuts in that, and you can skip the sugar… Mama’s a diabetic, so I had to use coffee instead of liquor when I made it for her, but it was >oh! drool!< very good!
Apple Pie and spiced rum sound pretty awesome! Can that recipe be shared?
In re alcohol: I learned something this week – I have a long standing affection for the work of Eudora Welty, the short story writer and novelist from Jackson Mississippi, died in the last century. I had the idea she was a cloistered spinster and certainly, coming from Baptist Mississippi she wouldn’t drink. So wrong. She knew where all the bootleggers were during prohibition and carried a travel flask of bourbon when she went North to lecture at Bryn Mawr and the likes. She also had a chaste but nonethless passionate love affair with the married Kenneth Millar who wrote detective novels under the name Ross MacDonald. Such are the pleasures of biographies 🙂
Lol—I know Jane would send you that recipe. We used Sailor Jack’s. We save the Captain for mixing the Captain and Lime.
The joke down in Oklahoma is that if two people won’t look at each other in a liquor store they’re both Baptists.
Yup. My late father-in-law hated it when liquor stores became legal. He was used to having his liquor delivered to the back door by the bootlegger.
I have been relatively lucky in the weather so far. I am not looking forward to the cold weather, though my two plug-in heaters are doing okay so far!
Poor Edmond (the cat) was very ill for two weeks, but he’s finally coming out of it. I’d been worried there for a bit, but the vet got him medications and now he’s almost entirely back to himself. This puts me in a much better mood.
But Russ can’t get home for Thanksgiving. He thinks, if the weather is good, he might make it between Christmas and New Years, though. Maybe we’ll get to do a little bit of holiday stuff.
I’m just writing away for NaNo, and having a good time. Fun stuff, really — just the kinds of things I needed to do to put me in a good mood. I’ve come to realize that I write fun adventure stories and that’s what I’m going to conitinue to write, market or not!
At least I’m having fun!
So glad for Edmond and you; and hugs about the holiday situation.
WOO HOO !!! Found out yesterday that my computer track pad problems were due to a worn out battery. I had envisioned major overhaul involving cat hair, dander what have you! Oh the relief! and joy! Batteries are costly (I’m a MacBook) but nothing like what I was expecting. 😀
We had snowy slush yesterday afternoon but I don’t think anything else is in the offing. It’s supposed to warm up a bit over the weekend, just the right temp for working outside. We’re finishing a major clean-up and stacking wood. 🙂
We’re doing the Thanksgiving shopping today…it’s a very low key event for us. Proge does the turkey on the grill and we do have a few favorites like sauteed brussel sprouts and my own roasted squash cheese cake. I’m with kokipy, any chance of sharing the apple pie recipe?
And what does anyone know about the one liner I just heard on The Takeaway about scientists duplicating sub-atimuc particles going faster than the speed of light?
It’s particle-level, but there is some talk of that. And the theory is now that the Big Bang was faster than light speed…
I would be tempted to have a hot buttered rum with the pie.Being from Texas I can relate to your memories of the wind.
Small Pet Warnings…
If Spot’s under 30 pounds, bring him inside.
Yep. Wind. Lotsa wind on the prairies. It just gets going and finds no reason to stop. But the grass is really pretty when the waves get going.
@Zette – I love your adventure stories. It’s just that sometimes your brain outruns your typing and then prepositions get left out. Most of those got fixed in _Kat among the Pigeons_ fortunately. I’ll figure out how to contact you sometime after NaNoWrMo. Keep writing, I’ll keep reading.
It’s good to hear your cat is getting better, and I hope you have a good holiday.
@pholy and zette: ditto for me, I just finished Kat among the pigeons, and I liked it.
Have you tried Zette’s “Summer Storm”? It’s great fun! It was too tempting to pass up, even though I’m trying to save my nickles and dimes for mid-December in case Closed Circle puts out “Chernevog” (hint hint). (It happens that I never read it. I need to repair this omission. I’ll put it on my Kindle next to “Rusalka”, which I have always loved.)
As for weather — you people west of the Rockies keep sending your horrid weather to those of us on the eastern side. We received your wind. Thanks so much. 50-60 mph here, worse closer to the mountains. We’re used to wind. Everything loose blew away already, back in July. Now you’re trying to send us snow. So far we have deflected most of it to the southern part of the state, but from the look of the clouds today this is about to change. They say it’s going to be another cold snowy icy winter like last year. (Sigh!)
Yeah, it snowed last night on the west/wet side as well. The night before a night predator took 2 large geese from the back pasture and consumed most of them. This is an area where my Siberians don’t go, so the scent deterrants weren’t there. My Siberians alerted me, and I was out in the pasture with a flashlight and a really big stick (shovel handle) at 3am in case I could rescue the birds. Didn’t see any critter working on the kills….but found them in morning light. I cannot find any place where a coyote came under the fence line and I’ve never had raccoons or bobcats mess with geese, so this is reading cougar. All of the above critters are regularly sighted in my neighborhood. Luckily, cougars tend to keep moving rather than sticking with a small territory. My neighbor’s Newfie scent alerted to 2 places in the fenceline indicating the critter(s) went OVER the fence. So, my neighbor’s and I spent yesterday afternoon building a shelter for the geese and I spent an hour building a obstacle course to direct the geese into the new place for the night. Herding them into a place they’ve been before is so much easier than into a new place with a narrow gate (sigh). So, this morning I had snow to try to look for tracks in case the critter came back. Unfortunately, not much was left of the 2 geese….not much incentive….no tracks. And probably was the reason why no litter was scratched over the remains….not enough to come back to. Something like this is probably the ONLY reason I’d wish for snow…otherwise, it belongs up in the mountains~!
You watch it. If it’s a cougar, it’s probably well-fed, but still…
Well, I was pretty convinced it was either a coyote or raccoon when I went out into the pasture in the middle of the night….both of which I thought I could easily scare off. Let’s just say I’m more cautious now….
Thanks everyone for your nice words about my books. I am, really, trying to figure out where my market is and this helps.
And I’m waiting for Chernebog, too! Yay! So much fun stuff to read on my Nook!
We might, or might not, have snow in the next couple days. If we do, it won’t last. Winter is coming. I am managing now to run around in circles in a panic. LOL.
The new kitten is now five months old and as apt to answer to “You! Demon Kitten from hell!” as to Buffy. This is the most lively cat I have ever known. She unfortunately has a tendancy to nip, but I’ve started breaking her of that one finally. When Russ finally met her in October, he told me he was sure she had been raised by snakes since she’d ‘fttt’ him so much. I’m tending more towards raccoons because she gets into everything. And she has the mask for it.
When it comes to the perpetual 20-30 mph wind, you’re preaching to the choir here — I’m in the TX panhandle. We’ve already got a fair number of Canada geese here, so it’s tuning up to get winter. I don’t think we’ll get as many geese this year as we usually have, though. So many farmers didn’t plant a crop this year, between that and the drought and the fires, there’s not much for them to eat.
I got to admit, you’re windier than we are up in NE Oklahoma. We’ve got a friend up in Darrouzett, he moved there from Follett.
The rain has been rumbling through in impressive thunderheads today on the southern Oregon coast, but this evening the stars are out, so of course its going for COLD. The poor geese were pretty messed up all summer here, I saw some going through mid-August so I’m not surprised we’ve had an early winter. Annoyed, but not surprised! Its been an all-around strange year for critters, really, as I saw bobcats twice in town here back at the tail end of summer.
We’ve been amazingly scant of wildlife this year in the Inland Empire. (Spokane.) I’ve seen marmots and coyotes in one year—raccoons and herons in another. Absolutely nothing this year. We haven’t had much moose activity, and the Hospital District bear hasn’t been heard from in two years. Our weather this summer was cool, and it’s definitely headed for snow.
A neighbor and I have both seen the largest raccoon we’ve ever seen before. We have raccoons all the time, but I have NEVER seen anything this big. Mutant raccoon, looking to take over the world. When they rise up and spread over the rest of the country, you’ll be the ones who know where the danger started and maybe have a chance to come in and destroy their secret lab.
(Which is apparently under my house, since I keep hearing the beast under there.)