St Croix River Road Ramblings

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Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Winter Visit to the Cabin

With the weather nice for a few days, and Margo recovering from her last chemo, and Scott taking a few days off from work, I decided to spend a few days at the cabin at Cushing.

Four beautiful brown and white country mice in the traps, and two tiny shrews--all frozen up in the cabin.  Four traps were still baited and not set off, so am keeping up!   A month ago the count was 5 mice and 1 shrew!   Seems to be an endless supply migrating into the cabin.

A few tracks on the lake from ice fishermen, but not very many.   So many other lakes are better for fishing that other than easy access, ours is ignored.   Never did catch many fish in it--so I suppose most of them are still waiting to be caught!  We used catch small northerns mostly.

Working at the Luck museum to get out the latest newsletter.  Should have it ready tomorrow.  Got to visit brother Ev at Alpha and pick up some Burnett Dairy cheese ends,  and stopped at neighbor Buz at Atlas for an update on his latest book--a novel somehow music related.   He is 3/4 done he says.  I help him with the cover design and getting it through the createspace.com printing process.

The Polk Men's group met this afternoon at the Luck museum   We are an eclectic group of retired folks, mostly aging liberals who meet every 2 weeks for coffee, cookies and discussion.  Today was predictions for the future.   The predictions were more of the same in politics, and talk about the future of small towns, of schools, mixed with many stories, jokes, and reminiscences -- very rambling.  We got into a discussion on guns and gun control.  As many of us are hunters we had varied points of view.  The meeting ended with the jar of pickled herring and crackers were gone.

I am hanging around through Saturday.   Need to go to the Friday afternoon North West Wisconsin Regional Writers group at 1 pm at the coffee shop just west of Grantsburg on Hwy 70.  Our writing topic this week is "A Place to Write."   I am the treasurer so I want to be there to keep track of the book sales for our new anthology out last month    Link to Creative Reflections

The cabin has a wood stove so depending on whether I want to get up in the middle of the night and feed the fire, I can wake up warm or cold.  Drinking a lot of water before going to bed helps me remember to get up.
Didn't see any wild life at all at the cabin so far--not even any birds.

Chuck and Carol invited me over to Bone Lake for supper last night--very nice as I had just some microwave popcorn that I was planning to zap at the cabin for supper and breakfast.  They live in the deep woods where the snow comes and covers the ground and stays in the shade.   At the cabin, there a many open south slopes that melt off so it looks like a milder winter.  Chuck and I decided to do a February beginners maple syrup session at the Luck museum on the 4th Thursday night of February.  We have been doing this for a couple of years to get ourselves excited about tapping maples.   Normally we have a nice turnout and lots of maple syrup hobbiests  join us and we get to talk about our cookers, taps, sheds etc.
Not too far off!

Margo is feeling better this week and is very happy to have just one more chemo next Monday!  The chemo is on Monday, by Friday - Monday of that week she gets quite tired and sick, and then starts recovering so that by the next Monday (2 weeks later) she is ready for the next one.  The last one is the 16th in the series.   Then a few weeks off, tests and a talk with the surgeon, and when recovered from chemo, surgery and when recovered from that radiation.  She was diagnosed in June, started treatments at the beginning of August and should be all done by May or June.  Things are going well as far as the cancer going away.