Have been in Virginia for 4 days now, and so far I am still unfrozen and am actually enjoying the weather for the most part. Even though it is raining today and may curtail any activities outside for me. Right now I'm just finishing up my usual routine of checking email, looking at facebook, reading the comics, and getting something to eat for breakfast/lunch.
   I spent some time yesterday putting together a couple loaves of sourdough bread. I got the starter a couple of months ago when I visited my sister and her husband at their place out in Morton Washington. Martin had created the starter himself and was good enough to give me enough to get me started, and I have managed to keep it alive since then. It makes really wonderful sourdough pancakes just as it is, but it has been difficult to work up a good bread recipe so far. The hard part is that almost all recipes for sourdough bread include adding in more yeast, rather than letting the natural yeast in the starter do all of the work of making the dough rise. What I didn't understand until yesterday is that it can take from 5-12 hours if you rely just on the natural yeast in the starter. Of course it would be easier if I just used extra yeast also, but it turns out that Rima is somewhat allergic to that, which is why she doesn't eat much regular bread.... or drink beer or wine either. Thankfully she can still drink regular alcohol though.
    So the end result is that it was after midnight last night before the bread actually came out of the oven. Even then it still isn't quite what I'm looking for. The taste was fine, but there is still a question of how much additional liquid needs to be added while mixing. This last batch was really sticky during its second rise. So there is some additional work to be done before it works the way it is suppose to.
   In the meantime there have been other things happening since I got here. I got here late Saturday afternoon after two days of driving up from Florida. Sunday was spent sleeping and catching up with Rima. We had a very nice lunch out at our favorite restaurant in Floyd, Micky G's, and we also ran a couple of errands and did a little grocery shopping.
    Monday came in sunny and almost warm. Rima had to work at home all day so I spent the afternoon outside cutting down trees and then carrying them back up the hill when they fell down the hill instead of up. I got most of one tree up off the worst part of the hill, but it meant cutting it up where it lay and moving one 25-30 lb piece at a time across the fall of the hill while worrying about either falling down the hill or breaking a leg sliding off one of the moss covered rocks. I have to admit that after nearly 6 months of not doing any logging stuff like that my back and legs were pretty sore that night and most of yesterday.
   I took a day off from most labor yesterday. One, because I was still sore, but also because it was grey and raining outside. So I drove into the big city yesterday afternoon and did some additional grocery shopping and then stopped into Home Depot to pick up some 2x4's, screws and a new air compressor. Most of the wood will be used to rebuild some walls out in the barn so I can outfit a small shop to hold some tools and do some work out of the weather. The air compressor will help run some of my nail guns as well as keep the truck tires inflated where they are suppose to be. Of course all of that stuff still needs to be unloaded from the truck since it was near dark last night when I finally made it back here.
   It was raining pretty steady all morning here, but has nearly stopped at this point. So this afternoon will be the time to get everything unloaded and get busy tearing off old sheathing and preparing to start rebuilding. I'm looking forward to it.


brk*