Adopted By a Deer

I was coming out of the chicken coop Friday afternoon when the little deer spotted me and came walking in my direction. I gave it a handful of scratch grains.

After dinner, we heard the driveway alarm go off, so I stuck my head out the kitchen door to see if someone had pulled in. The little deer was standing in the driveway. When it saw me, it came trotting over onto the porch. I walked out and we had a short conversation about how it wasn’t allowed to come into the house. It hung around the porch for a bit and eventually wandered off.

[By the way, the husband has been feeding it, too. He throws the apple cores from his lunch box out for it.]

The husband came in from chores yesterday morning and commented to me about the animal tracks in the driveway, so I went out to take pictures.

Sylvester tracks:

Sylvester is the cat who hangs out around our chicken coop and catches mice. He looks just like the cartoon Sylvester; hence, the name. We’re not sure if he is feral or belongs to someone.

Deer tracks:

Human tracks (me in my muck boots with ice cleats on them)

Coyote tracks:

I stood up and turned around after taking that last picture, and the little deer was standing behind me. (Scared me half to death.) Apparently, it has decided I am a good hooman. I went and got it a carrot for breakfast:

I expect to come down some morning and find it sleeping on the dog bed on the porch.

The 2022 salsa production run ended with a total of 53 quarts. I am going to buy myself another 20-quart stock pot; I manage with the collection of pots I’ve got, but I do a lot of transferring from one to another as the tomatoes cook down. A second large stock pot would make the process more efficient. Otherwise, my kitchen is designed very well for canning. The gas stove is in an island and I have access to all sides.

I also had 12 quarts of sauce left over that didn’t get turned into salsa. I ran that canner load before leaving for my meeting yesterday morning. The kitchen still needs a good cleaning.

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I went straight from my meeting to town (ugh—so many people) and ran some errands before my serger class at 1 pm. As it turned out, I had two students. One signed up at the last minute. That worked well, though. The two students had similar machines, so I sat between them and walked them through everything I wanted them to learn. Each of them was serging confidently by the time class was over.

I also got the instructions for the Serge of Creativity class I’m teaching next Friday. I will try to get that sample made before Wednesday so the owner can feature it in the weekly Facebook Live video. That class is filling up; one of yesterday’s students signed up before she left. I think it will be a fun class.

We’re heading for a deep freeze this week. The low on Thursday morning may be close to -20F, with the high only getting to zero degrees F.