Birthdays and Blackouts

We had an eventful week here at The Acre. First off, we announced to the world we are married.

Once the DMV gets involved, you know it's official.
During a winter storm event that all predictions said would miss us by a mile, we got about six inches of snow and lost power for a day. Big Man had to drive Cupcake in to work. Cupcake's father always said a cop is the best driver in snow, but at the time he was talking about a desk riding paper pushing cop. Cupcake was riding with a head knocking, patrol car pushing, baddest man in the 'hood working cop, so she was in good hands.

We prepped for this, we had plenty of food stocked up, five cans of gas, and a generator to run the lights and whatnot.

Plus we have a fireplace for heat, which came in handy because when we woke up to find the power off, it was -10* outside.

We didn't skip a beat when the power went out. Big Man washed six loads of laundry, smoked a pork loin, and had a pot of beans and baked cornbread on the grill. The power came back on about bedtime so a day without power went unnoticed.
During the cold, the egg girls kept on laying at a high rate of speed. We have been getting about six eggs a day, which has lead to a stockpile of fresh eggs. We were sitting on five dozen at the time of this picture.

We have been enjoying jalapeno jelly with cream cheese for lunch on the weekends. Jalapeno jelly is sweet, hot, and just plain angry looking, but it sure is tasty on a cracker.

We also made another batch of homemade butter, we seem to be going through a batch a week.

Unlike most of the things we fix DIY, this is NOT cost effective. We can buy an eight pack of stick butter for about what we can make four sticks worth of homemade, but there is no comparing the taste, so we stick with it because we have free time like that.
We also had some "Mountain Man" adventure over the weekend, when Speedy caught the first of many (we hope) raccoons in his trap. They are garden and coop wrecking varmints, and we wont kiss them around The Acre.

And we pulled out one of Deadshot's deer legs and prepped it for a date with the smoker next week. Right now it's been tenderized and is soaking in buttermilk. Follow up next week.

Sunday was Cupcake's birthday, so there were spankings and chicken wings.
See you all next week.
K&K