We are farmers!
We spent the weekend housesitting for one of my coworkers at his place up in the Catskills. He and his wife have a converted barn with a few acres of land and they have chickens, geese, ducks, and dogs. Luckily, the farm chores were mostly making sure everyone got fed, but we did have to get up at sunrise to let the chickens out of their coop and feed them.
We spent the most time with the dogs, of course, since they followed us everywhere (which might have mostly entailed sitting next to our feet while we read). The chickens seemed pretty indifferent to us and the ducks didn’t come near us. The geese were real drama queens, squawking and honking at each other most of the time, when they weren’t pooping all over the place.
Besides for our chores and tromping around outside in the snow, we spent the rest of the time reading and watching season 4 of The Wire. I had fun cooking with the delicious fresh eggs and on their powerful commercial stove and oven. We didn’t look at internet or TV all weekend long, except to watch the Daytona 500 (Way to go Newman!).
More pictures here.
E’s friend Sharon invited us to come out to her share at Fire Island, and we’d never been there before so we were excited to go. Fire Island is a long narrow island south of Long Island. We took the train and then a ferry boat to get there. It’s kind of idyllic on the island—there are no cars and people get around on foot or cruiser bikes.
We spent two days on the beach, though the waves were so rough I couldn’t go very deep into the water. Whenever I tried to get much past waist deep, I got wiped out. Sharon’s friend Kyle also came, and brought his dog, Mazzy. She was pretty cute and we had a lot of fun playing fetch with her in the surf. She was smart—she would wait until the waves brought the ball shallow enough for her to get it.
The share house came complete with a deck and a grill, so we grilled pork loin (a recipe I had tried in Lubbock) and corn on the cob. We always wish we had more opportunities to grill.
We had a great time, but I don’t know how people come back relaxed and refreshed from the beach. We came back exhausted, slightly sunburned, and covered with 
After 3 days of watching live music for 12 hours a day (1 p.m. to 1 a.m.), I’m exhausted. I’ve seen so many bands that they all run together in my head. Alex had to spend his days at the Blender House, working on his chicken and bee drawings, so I went to the day shows on my own. That was probably my favorite part—what could be better than escaping New York winter to hang out in the Austin sunshine, listening to music, beer in one hand, taco in the other. For the curious (Toby), these are the bands I saw. Most of them I even sort of remember.
After a few days in Quebec City, we went about 30 miles outside of the city to the Station Touristique Duchesnay, an outdoor sports and recreation area. We were in one of the smaller lodges, so it felt sort of like a winter camp. Outside our lodge was an ice skating rink, and it was empty when we got there, so we thought it was a perfect opportunity to try skating again. I had only been once before and E not much more, so we aren’t very good. But out there by ourselves, we started to feel like we were figuring it out a bit. Hopefully we’ll remember what we learned next time we try. We were just glad no one was watching, since it seemed like the Canadians were all born knowing how to ice skate.
The next day, we decided to try cross country skiing. We did one 5k trail and were feeling pretty confident (even though we were being passed by lots of old people), so we decided to do another 5k trail.We manged to get going pretty good, but we forgot to ask anyone how to slow down when going downhill in the cross country ski tracks. I ended up falling down to stop a few times. By the end of the second trail, we were feeling pretty worn out and sore. I had heard that cross country skiing is great exercise, so I assumed that would mean we’d be really sore the next day. Unfortunately, I was right about that and we were pretty sore the rest of our trip.
We had gone out to Duchesnay primarily to spend a night at the Ice Hotel, a hotel built entirely of snow and ice. The walls are built of packed snow, supported by pillars of ice blocks. The inside is full of ice sculptures and many of the rooms and suites had themed sculptures. We bundled up and spent the evening exploring the ice hotel. The bar inside serves drinks in glasses that are blocks of ice and we had some tasty maple whiskey while talking to the bartender, who had actually been on one of the crazy canoe race teams. We got in the hot tubs to warm up and then headed for our icy bed. Too keep the guests warm at night, they put everyone in expedition weight mummy bags. Not too surprisingly, neither of us slept that well. E managed to get cold in his mummy bag. I was warm enough, but I got tangled up in it and couldn’t find a comfortable position.
The next day we were pretty groggy until we headed out to the dogsledding kennels. We were both pretty excited about dogsledding and it turned out to be the highlight of our trip. When we got there, all the dogs were freaking out—they were ready to go run. We had a team of 6 dogs on our sled, following two other teams. We were pretty nervous about driving at first, but it wasn’t as hard as it had seemed. E took the hardest part, driving at the beginning while the dogs were all worked up. They took off pretty fast and whenever we had to stop, they’d start fighting each other and the guide had to come untangle them. By the time I took my turn, the dogs had settled down and were much calmer and slower. The two women with the team in front of us had more trouble, unfortunately, and took a header into a tree. After our ride, we went back to the kennel and got to play with the puppies. They were super cute, with very warm fuzzy coats.
Last week, we took a vacation to Quebec. I had wanted to go to Quebec years ago, when I saw pictures of the walled city with the Chateau Frontenac at the top. Last year, I read about their Winter Carnival and all of the kid-friendly activities. Since E and I are generally entertained by the same things that entertain kids, it sounded perfect for us.
Winter Carnival involved lots of snow sculptures. My favorite was the American entry in the international snow sculpture competition—a group of elephants. We felt bad for the Belgian team—their sculpture was looking great and when they were working on the last element, it collapsed. There were also snow slides, a soapbox derby race, and dance alongs featuring hilarious dance troops, particularly the group that led the snowsuit-clad crowd in line dancing. The Carnival goers carried plastic horns and plastic canes filled with the beverage of Carnival, a concoction of port, brandy, and triple sec known as caribou. We got a horn (I was much better at blowing the horn than E—guess having played the french horn badly was good for something), but decided we’d rather have our caribou in smaller doses. It doesn’t taste very good, but it definitely makes you warmer.
My favorite part of Winter Carnival was the canoe race. Teams do laps in the St. Laurence river. This is complicated by the fact that half of the river is a mass of moving chunks of ice. So the teams row upstream for part of the race, and then turn and go down the other side of the river on top of the ice. There’s too much ice to row, so they mostly run on the top of the ice, dragging the canoe. It looked insane. We got cold by the water watching the race, so I can’t imagine how cold it was to be wet and down on the ice.
For the most part, we weren’t too cold. It was mostly in the local digits. And we were wearing a lot of clothing. Each morning, we put on long underwear, fleece pullovers, ski pants, coats, two pairs of socks, scarves, hats, gloves, and boots. We didn’t mind the cold and were happy to see snow since it had been such a warm winter in New York. It snowed a few times while we were there, so the snow stayed mostly white and pretty, instead of grimy and gray like in New York. They said that there was less snow than usual, though, only about 2 feet instead of 6 feet.
One day was exra-cold though, around -10°F. We were walking around the city and whenever I took off my glove to take a picture, my hand went numb almost instantly. Luckily, we had planned that day to visit La Barberie, a local brewery. Mom had called them before we went to try and buy us a gift certificate. They couldn’t take a credit card, so they told her for us to just stop by and they’d give us a free tasting. The tastings were “carousels” of beer. Don’t worry—the glasses weren’t as big as they look in the picture. The 8 glass carousel added up to 2.5 pints. My favorite was the one flavored with raspberry and lime, but they were all very good. We had a great time tasting all the beers, chatting with one of the employees, and staying toasty warm inside.
We’re leaving for our trip to Quebec in a little over a week. We’re going to be in town for their Winter Carnaval, and then spend a few nights just outside of town, where we’ll dogsled and spend a night in the Ice Hotel.
E had wanted to go to the 
Since we rested New Year’s Eve, we were all ready for a big day of watching football on New Year’s Day. I made Hoppin’ John with black eyed peas for luck and collard greens. Somehow, given that all of that was cooked with plenty of pork fat, I don’t think it was the healthiest of meals. Very tasty though!