the deer

Wow! After a wonderfully busy holiday season, I am happy to be posting again. Our life seems to go in spurts--we are either running around crazy or things are so s l o w that we feel stagnant. Either way, I forget to take pictures! I'll try to get you caught up and do better at documenting our life during 2015.

Let's go back to right before Thanksgiving, when Dave shot a deer. A member of our branch has a farm and lots of deer are always visiting his fields, so Dave headed up to be a mighty hunter and shot one within the first hour. Thank goodness! We were really happy for some free meat. Dave gutted the deer and hung it to drain in Brother Drury's barn. When he came home, Jed asked him "where is our deer? We need to eat it for Thanksgiving!" Apparently our talks about pilgrims, Indians, and the first Thanksgiving had sunk in. The next day was Thanksgiving, and on Friday we headed out to go skin the deer and get it butchered out. We had gotten a bit of snow during Thanksgiving and the temperature had dropped sharply, so it was very chilly working in the barn.

We learned a lot butchering this first deer. On the one hand, the freezing weather made it really nice because the deer didn't smell at all. On the other hand, it made it incredibly hard to get started with the skinning.  

 It took quite a while to peel back the skin from the incision down the center, since there was no resistance. Finally Dave and I got into a good rhythm and things started to move quickly.

 The boys were in awe of the deer and had a blast poking around the barn. I forget what an amazing playground a barn is, but watching them brought back all sorts of memories of exploring my own grandpas' barns and workshops. Hank was especially delighted by the Drury's chickens and would be in the chicken run still if I'd have let him stay.

 I totally felt like "I am woman, hear me roar" working on this deer. Dave and I would slide our knives under the skin for a ways and then pull the skin off and after a while, it was just like peeling a banana. Pretty cool to see all the muscles and look at the amazing way an animal is put together.

 Jed was bound and determined to help saw the legs off the deer, which Dave let him do after the skin was finally off and we were ready to start butchering. At that point, the boys were freezing and the Drurys kindly insisted the boys and I come inside the house while their son helped Dave finish the butchering. I was a little disappointed--I really wanted to be involved in the whole butchering process--but I didn't trust the boys to behave themselves in the Drurys interesting old farmhouse without some parental supervision. Jed was amazed by their one-eyed cat and all their carved ducks.

After the deer was cut into four pieces--two front and two back legs--we took it home and put it on ice in our coolers to drain. We learned from a good friend of Dave's in Texas that this allows even more blood to drain and prevents the meat from having such a gamey taste. We let the meat set on ice over the weekend and on Tuesday, when our meat grinder came from Amazon, we started processing it. We tried to get as much fat as possible off the meat, since that also helps it to taste less gamey, and cut it into roasts, fajita strips, stew meat chunks, and kept lots for grinding. We worked until midnight and then cleaned up, only half done. Wednesday we worked until midnight again and got everything ground up and wrapped and stocked into the freezer.

 Here is some of the meat--two bowls worth of ground meat and some of the roasts, stew, and fajita meat. The ground meat has darker and lighter bits because when I cook deer meat, I always combine it with hamburger. We decided to save ourselves the trouble of combining later and bought a 5 lb chub of hamburger to grind into the deer meat so it would already be combined. The deer meat is the dark red and the hamburger is the lighter pink. This worked really well. I cooked some a couple of nights later for a test run and it was delicious and tasted just like ground beef--a relief since I used part of the meat to make a casserole for my friend Angel who I later found out does NOT like deer meat! She didn't even notice!

Here are some of the roasts, fajita, and stew meat all wrapped up.

And here are the contents of the meat freezer downstairs. I usually to only keep meat in here, but we have so much ground meat now that I had to bring some upstairs as well. We wrapped the ground meat in .75 lb packages and we have 20 of them. Add that to the other meats and we ended up getting about 35 pounds of meat off the deer. I am so thrilled with our first foray into home butchering!

reviving the piano

So, you may remember our horrible piano. It doesn't sound horrible, aside from one sour G in the upper octave, but it looks HORRIBLE. Photographic evidence of the horrors:

 We got this piano from Dave's dad. It was in the house we lived in Montpelier, Idaho, that was owned by Surveyor Scherbel. Scott said that the company wasn't interested in keeping the piano and that we could have it if we wanted it. I have always felt like our house needed a piano, so we kept it and moved the poor thing to Texas and now Michigan. It is so nice to have a piano, and yet I really dislike how awful it looks. Peeled-off stickers, scribbles, and partially sanded, because clearly, someone else hated the way it looked too.

 Oh, yeah, and a horrible burned spot too. Finally I could bear it no longer, so I made the absolutely INSANE decision to paint the piano. (Some paint samples visible above)

 I attacked the sides and legs first. I did the whole thing with a hand sander because I felt like it would be easier to control and so the sawdust didn't get completely all over the house. I sanded both sides and then Dave came home and helped me take things apart so I could sand outside, and so the sawdust wouldn't get into the insides of the piano. 

 Ahhhh, SO much better already!

 Jed was totally enthralled with the inner workings of the piano. He and Hank had lots of fun playing (okay, banging) on the piano, and Hank kept taking the keys out and I'd have to get after him. But Jed also had fun seeing how the hammers worked on the strings and experimenting with different sounds he got by playing the pedals and playing harder or softer. It was fun to see him learning.

 Poor Dave--I always come up with a good project for myself and he ends up getting involved, usually because I bite off more than I can chew, and he has to help me out. But he is really good to help out happily, and I am so grateful. We had a good time sanding and painting together and I couldn't have finished without his expertise.

 Ugh, the lid with the burn! It was just so ugly! It took me forever to sand down so it only showed a little.

 The last thing I worked on was the lid that goes over the keys. I felt a little bad sanding off the label, but I didn't really have a choice. Everything had to come off so it would take the paint!

 After we got everything sanded, we vacuumed everything really well to remove all the surface dust, and then I wiped it down with a damp rag to get off any remaining dust. We let it dry overnight and in the morning I took the boys to the hardware store to get the paint! I was a little nervous committing to a color, but I have loved turquoise for so long and I kept seeing it places and it just seemed like the piano was asking to be painted that color. So, I went for a lovely turquoise called "Julep" from the Do It Best line that was latex paint and primer combined. We started painting after the boys were in bed.

 We gave up floor space in the basement to paint the rest of the parts, because I didn't want the boys tripping over or playing with them. Dave and I would usually paint at night after they were in bed, or get up early in the morning and paint before they woke up. We tried letting Jed help out on one piece, but it was so nerve-wracking, between the worry that he would spill, or get it on his favorite shirt, and my concern that the brush strokes go with the grain. I found myself wringing my hands in a very unfortunate and uncharacteristic way, and after he was done with one section, that was the end. I was happy for him to have a little part in the project, but I was also happy for him to be done.

We did 4 coats of the Julep, and then we started on with the Minwax Polycrylic High Gloss finish. It protects and also adds that shine that I was after. I found myself wishing we had a paint sprayer. The gloss was hard to work with--it would puddle and turn brown if it was even slightly too thick, and then we'd have to wait for it to dry and sand it off and try again. Finally, poor Dave figured out a good technique of applying a medium amount of gloss and then spreading it out over a huge area and just brushing back and forth and back and forth. He was much better at this than I,so he ended up doing all the gloss, because we wanted it to look GOOD. Poor Dave--he ended up doing 4 coats of the gloss before we were satisfied with the shine.

 Well, it may have been a trial, but LOOK at that SHINE!! Even though by this point, we were just ready to be done, it was very satisfying at the same time to have it look so good.

I took the felt off several of the piano parts when we sanded it, because the glue was horrible and it was peeling off anyway. So when we were all done painting and glossing, I cut some half-inch wide strips of felt and hot-glued them into place.

 I know the royal blue is kind of a wild color choice, but I wanted to use what felt I had on hand, and I figured with a turquoise piano, I might as well do some crazy felt color.

 We also took the time to use some Brasso on all the little brass parts on the piano--the music stand holders, the knobs, the pedals, and the wheels and their surrounding parts. Everything cleaned up really well and looked so good when we were done.

 I LOVE the way the felt looks, peeking out from under the lids. And the shiny brass looks so beautiful against that gorgeous turquoise!

Ta-Da! It is hard to see the shine in this picture, but I promise, it is very glossy.  I was like a little kid on Christmas morning when I got up today--I ran right downstairs to take another look at our beautiful piano.

The breakdown:
about a day's worth of sanding--probably around 8 hours altogether
4 coats of paint
4 coats of gloss (with some sanding in between coats)
$32 for a gallon of premium Latex paint/primer
$16 for a quart of Minwax Polycrylic high gloss finish
$5 for sponge brushes
Brasso and felt already on-hand

The finished product?

For me, worth absolutely every bit! I am so much more excited about playing it and singing with the boys, too, and that's really the reason I wanted to redo it: so we could get more joy out of something that had previously just been a fixture in our home.

painting the canoe

We dearly love our trusty red canoe. However, thanks to the elements, it has turned into our trusty pink canoe. Dave and I decided it would be a fun project to paint our canoe and see if we could class up our image on the river just a bit.

 

 Dave started by pulling off the remaining sticker bits from the sides of the canoe and sanding it lightly.

 

 It is crazy to see how red it used to be!

Next was Dave's favorite part of the project--research. The canoe is made of a particular kind of plastic that doesn't take paint very well, so he had to figure out how to make our paint job last for longer than a few days. He decided we needed to prime the canoe in hopes that it would help the paint adhere better.

 The boys were great priming helpers. The primer got applied quite liberally in a few spots, so it bubbled up in a rainstorm the next day. Dave let the canoe dry thoroughly and then sanded the bubbles and repainted, and this time everything was perfect. A few days later, Dave sprayed the canoe our base color--a beautiful blue.

 The boys were not invited to the actual painting, but were allowed to come look once the paint was tacky. Jed loves that blue spray paint! We let the blue dry for a couple of days and then it was time for the decorations.

Jed was adamant that there be turtles on our canoe, so we found a simple line drawing of a turtle online and sized it as big as we could. It wasn't very big since we could only print it on our printer here at home, but it is big enough. We printed two copies onto some card stock, and then Dave painstakingly cut out the turtle's shell on one of the card stock sheets and the outline of the turtle on the other.

Then Dave took two large pieces of newsprint and cut a hole in the middle and taped the card stock inside. The newsprint was necessary to protect the canoe from the over-spray we were anticipating when we sprayed the stencils.

The finished shell stencil. I am amazed at the artistic sensibilities of my husband! He is just good at everything!

 And then it was time to paint the turtles on the canoes! Jed was thrilled that he was allowed to help. 

 We used masking tape to stick the underside of the stencil to the canoe and sprayed the outline stencil, then removed it after about a minute of drying time. Then we layered the shell stencil on top and carefully used our fingers to press the shell to the still-tacky outline so it would stick without tape.

 We did have to use some masking tape on the edge of the shell stencil (on the underside) but applying the shell while the turtle was still tacky worked really well. The more turtles we did, the better our stencils became, because they got quite stiff with the paint and were easier to work with.

And here's the finished project:

 I love the way it turned out--exactly what we were hoping for!

We got a little crazy on the back side and did some dark green turtles with light green shells, and they're fun too. We did 9 turtles altogether and I'm so pleased with the way it looks! Now it is our trusty turtle canoe!

easing into summer

We have been busy enjoying our first two weeks of summer! I have loved having both boys home all day (most of the time) and we have figured out a fairly good routine, as good as can be with Dave's odd summer work schedule. Here are a few pictures of what we've been up to lately.

 Hank and I snuggling with his George before bed one evening.

 The boys reading with Daddy

 Hank looking through his binoculars on a little birding trip

 Jed on his last day of school--I love this awesome goofball!

The boys playing "minions" on Saturday. Jed loves being a minion and talked Hank into wearing the other set of goggles for a few minutes. Hank wasn't so keen on wearing them for a long time, but lately Jed has been putting his goggles on first thing in the morning and only taking them off at bedtime. He even wore them to play at some new friends' house! We get a lot of strange looks in the grocery store, but whatever. We're having fun.

We have been busy getting our garden in. We started our seeds back in February and nursed them along, moving them into bigger and bigger pots as needed. My kind neighbor Hope watched them diligently while we were gone on our vacation. We got everything planted last Monday, after Dave finished our third box, that runs along the back fence.

 This is the shady box on the south side of our yard. Lettuce, spinach, onions and broccoli. Some pest, either rabbits or bugs, has been attacking our broccoli, tomatoes and peppers. I am SO incredibly frustrated. I have nursed these seedlings along and suffered so much trouble with them, and it is beyond irritating to go out in the morning and find them chomped completely to the ground. Grrrrrr! We have started covering them at night with sheets and spraying them with a water/olive oil/soap mixture, and that seems to help a bit. Every year gardening brings a new challenge, that is for sure!

 This is the new box Dave built this year--it runs along the back/west side of our yard. For some reason, I felt like this box went in a lot easier than the two last year. I am not sure if Dave would agree, but it seemed to take much less time and effort. We have zucchini, marigolds (to hopefully keep the squash bugs at bay), roma and cherry tomatoes and jalapeno and banana peppers.

Here's the box on the north side of our yard. We have squash, cucumbers, more marigolds, a couple different varieties of tomatoes, bell peppers (which have mostly been eaten. sob), and some lovely raspberries from our neighbor Elaine's downstate garden. They have blossoms and I'm excited to see how many we'll get from our tiny raspberry patch. I bought two new bell peppers from the nursery uptown and I'll put them in tonight. And then cover them securely, so I don't go out tomorrow and find them gone. Can you tell I am bitter? I can't imagine being a pioneer wife and having this problem, when you can't just go into town for more. What if my ability to feed my family depended on the tiny seedlings I started myself and a critter ate them? Argh.

We made our summer bucket list as well. We had so much fun with this last summer! It helps me stay true to the things I want to do with the boys and gives us good ideas if we get bored.

This year's list includes picking berries, sleeping in the back yard, going canoeing, swimming and hiking, collecting cans and bottles and using the money to buy ice cream, and lots of other little crafts. Each of the boys have a couple of age-appropriate chores (Jed's include making his bed, keeping his toys picked up and putting away the silverware; Hank's include helping to pick up the books, and moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer). It is shaping up to be a great summer!