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.

 

July 2015

Happy Caleb

Some months are just fuller than others—full of family, activities, scares, travel and lots of mowing.  July was like that for the Henkels.

The month started with a bang as Jim, Kayme and their delightful trio of kids came for a visit.  The girls would make Scrooge smile to see their sheer, energetic enjoyment of life.  The family celebrated the Fourth on the third with the men setting off fireworks and admiring wives and children on the lawn feeding the mosquitoes.   Jim is constantly teaching “Bio 101” when he finds a frog, caterpillar or interesting plant so the girls’ vocabularies are amazing.  Rhiannon, 4 ½, commented very carefully and politely about “the grass getting pretty long, Grandma” and when shown the tiny pumpkins set on the vines,  2 ½ year old Rowan remembered last October and stated “They get orange, we take the insides out and make a smile.”  The girls played in the wading pool, picked cherries and made puzzles with Grandpa.   Caleb is stretching out and taking interest in things---lots of smiles and one little giggle for Grandma Hilde.

Watching the fireworks

Mark and Hilde spent many hours weeding and mowing during the month, as the grass grew at spring rates from rain and moderate temps.  Beans and cucumbers joined lettuce on the menu, with Hilde trying more uses for zucchini.    She also made a couple batches of peach jam.  The chicks are now big enough to go outside, so they are carefully released each morning into the  netted area, and shut up at night.  The caution has been enforced as there have been wildlife sightings in abundance within a mile radius of the Henkel hilltop:  a bear, a cougar (on a game camera) and a rabid raccoon.  Hearing a fox bark as the blue moon was rising on the 31^st was magical.

 For Hilde’s birthday, Mark took them down to Green Lake for a boat tour and then over to Wautoma for a very nice dinner.  It is unusual to be absent from taekwondo, but it was a special day.

Cuddling with Daddy after the pool

The senior Henkels also went to Sussex to assist in a repair job which had Mark and Jim digging and the water off, so Kayme and Hilde took the three kids to the zoo on a rather hot day, staying until things closed down.  Caleb was not unhappy to have Mommy all day, and the girls loved climbing on a dinosaur, seeing snakes and peacocks and enjoying a little ice cream.  Hilde hadn’t been to the Brookfield Zoo since courting days, and enjoyed the time with Kayme and the kids very much.  The next day Jim and Mark worked on gutters and drainpipes—always enjoyable for Mark to work with one of the sons.

There were some alarms for the family, with scary possibilities from Mark’s dentist checkup. It was a great relief to find out nothing was wrong.  Right after that, Jim had a violent reaction to an unknown substance and needed urgent care, oxygen and massive antihistamines.  The really scary thing was when Hilde’s mother was rushed to the hospital –it took about five days to get her heart settled down and all of that during the time when she was supposed to move into new apartment.  She was moved in absentia  (Hilde’s siblings did all the work!) and will be going to her new home after a few days of rehab.

Ready for the day at the zoo

Mark and Hilde have been tackling some of the odds jobs between things:  Mark eliminated several hornets nests, replaced a full pound of nails on the pole buildings and then they both tackled the “terrible triangle” –west ditch (steep and rocky) and fence row (eight massive pine stumps and a neighboring field sharing sumac and prickly ash).  The assortment of undesirable and even invasive species which can grow in a strip of pine barrens is amazing, but  the poison ivy, prickly ash and thistles were chopped down.

For the end of the month, Mark and Hilde headed to Madison where Mark networked and earned continuing education credits, while Hilde struggled to draft a resolution to change the county board rules.  They came home to find the refrigerator freezer had popped open and half the food either “toss-away” or “use immediately” which made for some interesting and immediate actions.

Gutter improvement

 July:  full of fun, fruit and family, what more can you ask for?

Which kind of leaf does he like?

Climbing a dino