November 2015

November was a swirl of feathers, flurries of snow, family time and flew by very very quickly.

Mark and Hilde spent the first day of November butchering roosters, and the feathers really flew due to the Mark 2 Clucker Plucker.  The chickens are tucked into the freezer and the fox and skunks got to feast on the innards down in the woods.

We went down to visit Jim and Kayme the next weekend, which was, as always, fun and busy.  Jim and Mark worked to get replacement sump pump in and wired properly and then Senior Master Jim led a mini class of taekwondo with his little girls.  They are so full of energy, and so enthusiastic!  Hilde got to visit her mom in the new apartment, which was very nice, and the three kids were very good for church, while Kayme was doing the playing.  Grandma melts when Rowan looks up, says “I love you Grandma” and then falls asleep on her.  Rhiannon played her little recital piece very proudly, and Caleb’s cr4awling and standing was a source of great pride to him also.

Mark returned to full time work as he prepared for the trial in Algona Iowa.  That included a trip out to Spencer IA (7 hours), a long set of motions as the snow began piling up and then a slow, slippery drive to return home.  Mark and Hilde were delighted that Jim and Kayme arrived early, made supper,  including pie, and welcomed them home with hot food, warm hugs and happy family.  It was great!  The next morning the guys were out for the opening of deer season and Hilde had play time with three active children.  The girls are really enjoying being read to, so both Grandpa and Grandma had fun with that.  On Sunday,  Jim got a nice buck, which he butchered with Mark and got right into freezer.

Hilde spent a lot of time in meetings again---seems that ad hoc committees are being formed each month!  However, as things are moving forward, some may actually finish up.  She did get to had a brunch with Donna and see her new house…taking one afternoon off felt almost wicked, but was great.  In between meetings, baking and chores, she made several pine cone wreaths as Christmas gifts.  Each was a little different, and despite her incredible sticky condition (she had some pine pitch in her hair when she got it cut!) from wiring and gluing some ten bags of cones, she really enjoyed it.  The pinch came when the large, fragile items had to be shipped.  Mark and Hilde spent considerable time and tape constructing special boxes for the wreaths and discovered that big names like UPS, are not the most cost-effective way to ship things.  Hurray for Speedee Delivery!  They cost 20% of UPS and all arrived in good shape and next day!

The retirement dinner for one of the local judges meant some  good visits with many members of the bar but best was seeing Kelly Benjamin again after many years.  Kelly worked with Mark for the first three years after law school, moved on to assistant DA and then off to Indiana.  She looks great and is running for judge herself in Indiana.  She will be a good judge.

For the first time since 1978 when Jim was born, Mark and Hilde had a very quiet Thanksgiving, just the two of them together.  They were grateful for the invites from others, but staying home and peaceful seemed just right, knowing that December was going to be VERY hectic with the trial.  It was a very good choice.  The only downer was the Packers game.  Mark and Hilde relaxed, fortified themselves for the trial and gave thanks. 

 

October 2015

Roof top consultation

This is a bookcase!

So tasty!

Lots of squash and pumpkins

Horicon egret on muskrat house

Splash of color across Lake Emily

Autumn creek view

October showed her best side this year, and Mark and Hilde got to enjoy it thoroughly, with a nice combination of being home and getting out and about.  Mark managed to do one more month of the ‘half-time’ although he handled lots of calls from home.  Meantime, the long raspberry season continued with last berries picked on the 27^th of the month! 

The month began with a trip to World Dairy Expo in Madison (where Mark and Hilde ran into various friends and relatives) and then on to Palatine to visit John and Evie.  John and Mark spent time up on the roof patching and caulking and Hilde hemmed curtains while Evie filled the spectacular full-wall bookcase which John designed and the two put together.  They have transformed their house with lots of hard work and imagination and finally solved the lighting issues of the great room also.

The garden finale included more tomato juice and ketchup, a burst of zucchini tots and choc muffins, pumpkin butter, pear-ginger jam and a few late peppers.  The majority of the pie pumpkins went to church for the pie ingredients, but many others were shared with family and friends, plus the fruit cellar has little room in it, as the harvest bounty is amazing.  The Dark Brahma rooster was given to a family with a child in 4-H---it would have been a shame to butcher such a handsome critter!   Mark and Hilde found the one snow apple tree had a very heavy yield or perfect apples, and that some of the few pears could be salvaged also.

It was fun to help out Karen Johnson this month by supervising her taekwondo classes for UWSP twice when she had conflicts.  Teaching young intelligent adults is a joy!  This month’s taekwondo testing included a special presentation to Dr. Stevens in recognition of 35 years of his teaching there.  Since the numbers were a bit smaller, and the testing panel very efficient,  Mark and Hilde made a special afternoon of it, after picking a few raspberries, driving around, looking at the wonderful colors and scenes of fall, plus enjoying dinner at China Palace.

Mark and Hilde took one lovely fall day to visit Horicon Marsh, getting lots of exercise and photos of the birds and flowers and colors.  The beautiful white egrets preened and posed, the asters were vibrant and different ducks were identified.  It was really a great day, including fish at the SilverCryst on the way home, chasing the dusk.  

The weather continued to be wonderful all month, so lots of final fall chores were FUN!  Mark and Hilde dug out the carrots, Mark cut all the corn and then disked up the garden.  They got the far west foundation bed redone and put in block edging, and did the final mowing for the year.  One afternoon while Mark was gone, Hilde spray-painted the radon removal system to match the house, leaving the final, above-the-roof section for Mark, so it no longer looks like an odd toilet back there.  The enormous tangle of morning glory vines were carefully cut off and removed and they further pruned that giant forsythia….things grow rather large in Rudolph!

Hilde has continued to meet, write and talk about the extreme opposition to farming in Wood County.  There is hope that some reasonable compromise can be reached, but it has taken many, many hours and gets a little frustrating.  It’s is a good thing that Hilde is an optimist!  She got to go on a tour of the really spectacular Sand Valley Golf development, where, unfortunately,  three vehicles got stuck in the sand.  It was a public/private collaborative effort as Wood county folks from Land conservation and Extension helped private folks push out cars.

Fall enjoyment continued with a picnic at Lake Emily just before cold and rain came in.  There were golden needles from the white pine sifting down on the table, and soft maple landing on them like golden stars.  Mark and Hilde also spent time out in the Seneca woods, checking out the hunting stands and finding some lovely late fall color on the ground.  This is the first fall in many years when they were able to get out and about often.

On a sad note, the long-time owner of  the  family, cat Coffee died at the end of the month.  He was almost 16 years old and was such a character, following folks around, facing down skunks and foxes and waiting on Tuesday and Thursday nights for folks to come home from taekwondo.  The Henkels miss him.

Jim and his lively family stopped by for a couple of nights toward the end of the month.  It is always amazing how fast the kids are growing.  Caleb wants to get moving like his sisters and is almost there, while the girls seem interested in everything with great vocabularies to discuss it all, from earrings to body parts.

Since October ended with rain, Mark and Hilde put off the scheduled chicken butchering to go go the movie “Bridge of Spies”, enjoying it very much.  They remember the times, the tensions, the fears and grittiness, all portrayed well.  Then, at the very end of the month, 11 pm on Halloween, Mother Nature played her trick with a sudden burst of thunder, lightning and HAIL.

What a full month!

Spectacular September 2015

Porcelain Basin

Buffalo with an attitude

Happy relaxed Henkels

September was a month to remember for Mark and Hilde.  After almost thirty years, they finally managed to go west for a vacation, leaving behind lawsuits, lawns, garden produce and county issues.   They really relaxed!   It was a great trip covering 2,790 miles over 7 ½ days.  The size and beauty of western US can’t be expressed, it has to be experienced.  Both Henkels enjoyed the enormous fields of corn, beans, wheat stubble and then sunflowers, sorghum and rapeseed, interspersed with vast pastures of black cattle. 

Mark and Hilde visited several historic military sites, including Ft. Phil Kearny, the battlefield sites for the Wagon Box Fight, Custer’s Last Stand and the Fetterman Massacre and then headed into Yellowstone for a couple of days.  What a treasure we have out there!  The lake so enormous, clear and tranquil, edged by seething mud, steam and geysers defies description.  The crowds were not too bad, but travel was slowed since right after Labor Day road work on the park starts, since they have a narrow window of work time before snow and cold.

View from Gardiner

Between Old Trail Town, complete with reburied western victims and a large collection of authentic buildings, and the wonderful Buffalo Bill Center of the West, Mark and Hilde found Cheyenne to be worth an entire day.  The Buffalo Bill Center has nature science museum, an enormous museum of firearms and another section of western Indians with some stunning artwork.  The section on Buffalo Bill was prefaced with a projection on mist for a holograph and traced his long colorful life.  A beautiful place!

Of course trips of this extent have a few glitches, like having the camera die, an infection, and minor problem with the car, but since Hilde’s county iPad takes good photos, Sheridan has a very efficient and patient friendly urgent care and a guy in Buffalo helped with the car for free, those incidents did not mar a lovely time.  It was great trip.

Right up to the day of departure and immediately upon return, Hilde was working on tomatoes.   After many quarts of juice before leaving, she switched to  making and freezing tomato soup for the winter weekends…LOTS of soup, plus a batch of the Schultz home-made ketchup.  This month brought on the fall raspberries and Mark and Hilde spent many afternoons out in the sunshine, picking more of those lovely fruits, storing them up for topping all the oatmeal .  

Happy girls

 Mark worked hard to clear out the tomatoes and finish fall tasks, including small areas of painting on the garage, a second coat on the new hen house door and then fixing the lawnmower when a drive belt snapped.  Hilde repainted the picnic tables and benches and FINALLY, after 2 0 years, stained and sealed the final bits of the molding and door frame for the bedroom, with Mark promptly installing and rehanging the bedroom door.  The temporary doorframe is finally gone!

Since all the canning, freezing and ketchup-making still left a lot of tomatoes, Hilde filled the back of the car and met Kayme in Winchester to pass them along to her.  The reward was a lovely picnic and playtime with Kayme and the grandkids on another perfect fall day.

Grandma and Caleb

Mark continued to work “half-time” which means he is not in the office full-time but on the phone quite a bit as things ramp up for the trial in December.  The flexibility of half-time and remote access has been very pleasant…Mark can get a lot done without sitting in the office and wasting time driving back and forth. 

Late in the month, the Henkels left early in the morning for a business meeting in Platteville and then drove up along the Mississippi to attend the inauguration of Lance Pliml, Wood County chairman, as the president of the Wisconsin Counties Association.  Fall color is coming slowly this year, but La Crosse is a lovely city and always great to visit there, even so briefly.  Hilde had one day on tour, away from kitchen work, seeing robotic milkers, shoreland preservation, soil judging sites, the Marshfield airport and other projects of the county.  Despite all the complaints about local and national governments, there is a lot of good work going on.

At the end of the month, with garden work almost done, chores list mostly complete, and three Packers wins to enjoy, Mark and Hilde, like so many others were outside watching the eclipse of the supermoon, but some of the sunsets for the month were really spectacular like this one on September 25.

 

Fantastic sunset

Excellent August--2015

August was a wonderful social month with great seasonal foods, family and friends in abundance and some wild weather in between.

Mark and Hilde really enjoyed  entertaining, feeding and seeing many friends.  Alana and Justin came for a visit, a select group of black belts came for corn roast, and Mark’s trial team, Sandra and Eric, shared another corn roast with them.  Hilde was happy to have Irene come out for lunch and scrabble one day and a ‘end of the season’ ladies lunch was great, too.

The harvest time started in earnest for the Henkels:  cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes and lots and lots of corn.  Hilde and Mark work well as a team and got the year’s corn frozen very quickly one Saturday morning.  Several batches of jam and jellies including cherry and cinnamon crabapple were tucked into the fruit cellar and batches of zucchini cake, zucchini tots and choc zucchini muffins were baked and frozen for winter.

Hilde was happy that her mother did well in rehab and was able to move into her new apartment and seems to be doing well there.  Arlene was able to visit Jim for dinner and cuddling of great-grandchildren before schedules ramp up for both drs. Henkel.  Mark got to spend more time on the radio with contacts in some new states and areas with unusual propagation windows in August.  On the county level, a tense and confrontational situation seems to have eased a bit…but civility is not exactly abundant there.  Hilde keeps trying.

August contained a wonderful fun day for Mark and Hilde as they met Jim, Kayme and family at Lakeside Park in Fond du Lac for a picnic and fun day for the girls.  Watching the joy on Rhiannon and Rowan’s faces while they rode the carousel and the rotoride was priceless, and chugging along on the little train, just as Mark did as a child, makes for wonderful memories.  Caleb is growing like a weed and watching everything, perhaps planning just what he will get into when he begins crawling

August started and ended hot in between they was hail, a long cool, wet period and some impressive winds.  Now the leaves are falling from the mountain ash, always the first to go, exposing the bright orange berries, the swallows have headed south and the early apples and crabapples are put away…summer is ending, but it was surely a good one, full of God’s blessings.