Photo Finish Friday - New Year's Eve

Looking ahead to the new year....




... or waiting for the party to start!

Happy New Year, everyone.

Photo Finish Friday is the brain child of Leah, over at the Goat's Lunch Pail.

Calf Update

Hayseus is doing very well. He spent a couple nights in the barn as a precaution, but is now outside in the fresh air.

Oh, Holy.......

......calf?

Meet Hayseus, our little Christmas surprise!





Imagine his surprise when the Rancher happened to spot one of the heifers lying in the snow, apparently in the midst of calving! He managed to sneak up on her and give her a little assistance, and she is now the proud mama of a handsome young calf. The first-time mom is quite protective of her calf, and will probably make a good mother, as long as she will stop licking him long enough to let him get a drink!
The Rancher gave him a little jump-start, and hopefully he will survive and thrive. It is cold here, and the poor little guy may lose the tips of his ears and tail, so send warm thoughts this way to help the weather smarten up, 'kay?
(Calving season isn't supposed to start around here until the middle of March. Someone must not have told this heifer.)
Merry Christmas!

Photo Finish Friday - Christmas Eve

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Feliz Navidad, God Yul, Happy Solstice, Happy Festivus!!



Whatever your flavour, all the best of the season to you!

Recipes!

So.
The Bag Lady is trying to get into the spirit of the season.
She thought that perhaps she needed to do some cooking to spark her Christmas spirit. She has baked Shortbread cookies (they're all gone already..... must make more) and made a batch of chocolates, which have also all disappeared perhaps she started too soon?

So she is going to do some marathon baking tomorrow..... shortbread, chocolates, butter tarts (which means making pastry using homemade lard!) and perhaps some snacky things like Spicy Ritz Bitz. She loves these. They are easy and delicious, and disappear like magic!
In the spirit of the season, she is going to share a couple recipes with you. Don't even TRY to count the calories in the chocolates. Really.

Spicy Ritz Bitz

2/3 C olive oil
1/2 tsp dill weed
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp lemon pepper
1 full pkg Uncle Dan's Original South Salad Dressing
1 box Ritz Bits mini crackers

Combine all ingredients, spread on cookie sheet and bake at 300F for 15 minutes.

Butterscotch Peanut Butter Chocolates

Melt together 1 pkg each of
Chocolate chips
butterscotch chips
peanut butter chips
Add
2 cups crushed potato chips (I know, I know, a health food blog this is not!)
Press into mini candy cups (the little foil or paper ones that look like muffin cups)
OR
drop by teaspoon onto wax paper.
Allow to cool (if you can wait that long)

Hoover Deer (edited)

The Bag Lady is having a terrible time getting into the spirit of Christmas this year! She hasn't put up a tree yet, and has only had the odd twinge of desire to do so. It seems like a lot of bother. Grinchy Baggie.

She did try to take some pictures of her outdoor Christmas lights, but they are blurry and out of focus. Sigh. These are the only ones that aren't too bad, but they aren't very good, either....





She was in her kitchen last night and something moved outside her kitchen window. It startled her, because she knew her dog and cats were all sleeping in the living room. She looked out the window and saw a deer eating birdseed off her deck! The woodpeckers that frequent her bird feeder occasionally go a little berserk and fling birdseed out of the feeder like they paid for it themselves are trying to find the only good one in the bunch! The deer was doing the Bag Lady a favour by cleaning up the mess the woodpecker made. She was hoovering up those sunflower seeds like she was starving.
(edited to add some really poor photos)

This was taken last night.....

She came back this morning with her young'un:


"If I could figure out how to reach that........"

"Uh oh..... busted!"


"I can see you..... can you see us?"

Photo Finish Friday - Bison

The weather in the Bag Lady's neck of the woods has been decidedly wintery lately, which has made her pine for the long, warm days of summer. She searched through her photos and realized that she hadn't shared this picture with you.

She and the Rancher took a drive one balmy evening last summer, and spied this herd of buffalo, complete with suckling calves.


The Bag Lady feels better just looking at the greenery and sunshine in this picture!

Ode to Old

Fifty three:

the odd pain in the knee
....
constantly feeling the need to pee
(especially when I laugh or sneeze!)
......
but I can clearly see
---
the alternative, I'd rather not be.

So, okay, the Bag Lady is not much of a poet, but she did survive another birthday.

Edited to add: Thanks, Hilary, for this:



Glad my terrible poetry made you smile!

Visiting Venison

The Bag Lady looked out the other day and saw she had some visitors in her yard!


She grabbed the camera and took some pictures through the glass (they were so close to her step that she didn't want to spook them by opening the door!)


They snacked on some birdseed that had fallen by the deck, then continued on their way. Fortunately, the Princess was sound asleep and not on guard duty at the time, or the Bag Lady wouldn't have been able to get even these poor quality pictures. There are actually three deer in the pictures, but one of them apparently wasn't interested in birdseed. If you enlarge the second picture, you can see him near the spruce tree in the right rear of the photo.

Fer Cryin' Out Loud

This is not ordinarily a "political" blog. The Bag Lady usually prefers to keep her head planted firmly in the sand leave politics to people who know more than she does about such things. Occasionally, though, something so ridiculous or idiotic happens that she simply cannot let it pass without some comment. Such a thing happened the other day while the Bag Lady had half an ear open to the television news while she was doing something else.

By now you are all, no doubt, aware of Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks. The Bag Lady has not been paying a huge amount of attention to exactly what his 'leaks' consist of, but she tends to think that a little light shining on some of these documents is not a bad thing at all.

On Nov 29th, Calgary professor (and former advisor to Prime Minister Harper) Tom Flanagan made a tongue-in-cheek comment in an interview on CBC regarding Assange. He said, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract or maybe use a drone or something.” The Bag Lady heard this statement and dismissed it as a slightly tasteless joke.

Imagine her surprise the other night while listening to the news to hear that Mr. Flanagan was being investigated for "counselling murder"! It was a freakin' joke, people! Tactless, yes. Indictable? C'mon.
The University of Calgary has since determined that Professor Flanagan was expressing a personal opinion and will not be sanctioned.

What bothers the simpleton Bag Lady about this is the fact that it is indicative of a greater problem with society. No-one is allowed to honestly express themselves in public. We all have to be so careful of what we say or how we say it because we may possibly offend someone (or incite an unbalanced person to act on our words). It seems to the Bag Lady that it was a huge waste of resources to investigate Professor Flanagan. She wonders how many people dug into his past and scrutinized his actions, trying to determine if he was a terrorist inciting action. How many humourless people analyzed his words, his body language and his intentions before they came to the conclusion that he just might have blurted out something ridiculous in an unguarded moment.
And how many of us have done something similar? Granted, not on national television, but the Bag Lady is willing to bet that every one of us has said something without thinking.
The Bag Lady is actually quite famous for speaking without thinking. Ahem.

She hopes she can sneak this blog post under the radar of the thought police..... 'cause really, they shouldn't waste a precious second of their time investigating something as negligible as the Bag Lady's thoughts!

Monday Snorefest

Let's face it, the Bag Lady has been boring lately. She hasn't been blogging much because she hasn't been doing much worth blogging about! She hasn't had anything make her angry enough to rant about (which is too bad - she loves a good rant now and again) and she hasn't won any lotteries, or gone on any fabulous vacations. She hasn't seen anything hysterically funny or even mildly amusing to share with you.

She had a virus or something on the weekend and was feeling poorly enough to spend a day lying on the couch, reading. (That's her excuse and she's sticking to it!) Her computer has been causing her some grief lately - taking forever to load almost every page she wants to look at. Has anyone else been experiencing problems with Google, or is it really just her computer? (Can a computer catch a virus from a human?)

The Rancher went back to work last week and has been working night shift, so the Bag Lady has been spending her days trying to be quiet, and doing her housework in the evenings after he goes to work. She doesn't like the disruption to her routine, but that's the way the mud flops (as the Rancher would so eloquently say).

She has been thinking about decorating for Christmas. She and the Rancher will be going elsewhere for Christmas; and with the Rancher on night shift, they probably won't be doing much in the way of entertaining, so she is thinking lazily seriously about doing a minimum of decorating this year.

The weather has been wintery, but not extreme. There have been some gorgeous sunrises lately, and the Bag Lady has a photo or two, but with her computer behaving the way it's been behaving, she wasn't patient enough to wait for a picture to load in this post. With any luck, the computer will sort itself out soon and she can share a picture with you.

Photo Finish Friday

As the Bag Lady pulled out of her driveway on her way to work earlier this week, she was pleased to spy a small herd of deer in the neighbouring hayfield.