Sleep?

With a winter storm warning for our area last night and work today, it seems like I didn’t get much sleep at all. I was listening to see if it was going to get as windy as they said. Now, if you’re thinking to yourself that this is really dumb – I agree! I mean if it’s windy no one can do anything about it right? Well just try to convince my brain that during the night! So as if I was getting disappointed or something when the weather wasn’t doing anything, all of a sudden around 2:30 the wind kicked in. Yup, there it was. Another snow storm. With our ditches around our area pretty full, I knew that if it was going to snow then I would really be in trouble. And just as on cue around 4:00 it started to snow. The one thing that I was sure of this morning was that I had to wait for the road grader to go but Daryl said that he was going to see if he could get to the highway before he came. When there’s no school, we’re not sure when we can get the roads cleared. So with his thick coat and hat on – out the door Daryl went. I was just praying that he wouldn’t get stuck because I wasn’t too excited about helping him try to get it out if he did. He was going to call when he got to the highway and it didn’t take long before the phone rang. OK, so he made it which was good. But he said that some of the drifts when he hit them went up and over the roof of the cab so I should maybe wait until the roads were cleared. At first I watched the roads pretty close to see if I could see the road grader coming, but then I got bored with that. I mean how long can you watch snow right?

Our yard today at noon!!

So I decided that I should get something done today. I have to burn a vacation day when I don’t go in and I sure don’t want to waste it. The first thing on my list was to get some computer stuff done. I wanted to download a bunch of pictures from our trip in January and today was a perfect day to do that. I worked on it for about and hour and a half and everything was going really pretty good. Then out of nowhere I see this sad icon saying that the software that I was using crashed. Not cool! All of the work that I was doing also was gone. I swear that I go through some bad electrical vibes sometimes, and I think I’m in it this past week. So I decided to walk away and try something else. I found a recipe yesterday for some sticky buns that looked good and since I’m not that great with baking with yeast I thought I’d give it a try. It’s the most crazy recipe because it has mashed potatoes in it! After I had baked some potatoes and mashed them, I was ready to get started. Now I confess I’m not that comfortable with baking with yeast so I followed the instructions word for word. I needed to get my water to a certain temperature so out came my candy thermometer and it was looking good. After I had it kneaded for 6 minutes into the bowl it went. It was supposed to rise and double in size in 30 minutes. Cool. While that was working on rising I finally made the commitment to organize our Christmas stuff better. Because we had my family Christmas in January I still had the winter village up in our kitchen until a couple of days ago. Kyle was nice enough to get the houses and all the other stuff down so I spent sometime to not only organize that for storage but also some of the other Christmas stuff. Now to check on my bread stuff. I was expecting it to be so nice and high, but nothing. Then I thought that maybe it wasn’t warm enough so I warmed up the oven and put a kitchen towel over the bowl on the stove to get it warmer.  While that was trying to raise, Kyle and I went outside to feed the animals. With Scarlet getting older and the milkhouse taking on ‘new’ smells, it was time for her to be in a pen in the barn. I climbed up in the hay loft and threw down some new bedding for her pen. It wasn’t bad in the barn today, but I sure don’t want her to get sick either.

Even I know that Scarlet is getting very spoiled

We laughed when we took a look at Little Kitty today. She must have seen what the barn cats do to Reno’s water pail. Since it’s insulated they tip it over if it has water in it and then climb inside when it’s cold. I suppose it’s like a little sauna inside. The water was gone this morning so in Little Kitty climbed. Now seriously how can you get mad at something so smart? Now that chores were done I was sure that my rolls were raised by now. And guess what? Still flat. So now I put the bowl inside the oven. Maybe it needed a little stronger encouragement. While I was seeing if this was going to work to have them raise I decided to decorate on top of the cupboards where the winter village was. Just for a joke I put the old shot gun milk can up there and I kind of like it up there. Who would have thought? After supper I checked the rolls once again and didn’t see much progress so into the bath I went. And now that it’s time to go to bed I thought that I could kind of smell the yeast so I checked them again. So NOW they decide to raise. Well, it’s too late to do anything with them now so I’ll have Kyle throw the dough up in the hay mound for the cats. It should be OK for them to eat it, there’s potatoes in it and everything.  I guess I’ll have to try it again another time.

Not really sure if it’s supposed to look like this or not?