literally “window-weather” – the type of weather that is best appreciated indoors. Icelandic
Today has started off as a day to hide indoors with a wood fire blazing, a hot coffee in hand and a new blog post to be written. We awoke to an ice fog with freezing rain soon to follow and decided after breakfast and chores, we’d be hiding indoors for the remainder of our Sunday. 
October started with the beautiful colours of fall, the bright blue skies and yellow leaves of the poplar trees. It started with cool weather and a couple frosty mornings. And then, last week, Mother Nature decided we needed to skip over all the beauty and splendors of fall and skip right along into winter. Over the past week we have been delivered at least a foot and a half of that white fluffy stuff called snow. We have seen the night time temperatures drop down below minus 10. And there seems to be no end in sight. While I am one to love the first snow fall, the way it clings to the trees and the grasses, coating everything white and pure, I love that in December, or even November is ok. But when October finds itself buried in snow, I worry about how long of a winter it is going to be for us.
It came without much warning, so we have flower beds still covered in dying flowers that never got cleaned up. Our vegetable garden remains are buried, what was left of our cabbage and pumpkins, cauliflower and brussels sprouts. Corn stalks are littered over the snow tops. We had to spend a day getting our animals and housing “winter proofed”. The chicken coop is now equipped with the heated waterer we made, the nesting boxes are heat taped and insulated and we have shut down the Polish coop for the winter and moved everyone into the big coop to help with warmth. The pig pen is a muddy mess still but hopefully when the ground eventually freezes that will help. The Pig Haus is warm and filled with new bedding. We used an old mud flap cut into strips to put over the door to help hold the heat in. We also got a water trough heater to put into their water pool so they will always have thawed water in the pen.
Dan and I took the opportunity last Saturday to make the best of a beautiful sunny snowy day and we headed west to do some hunting. We spent the day out on the lease roads and cutlines, looking for elk and deer.While we didn’t spot much for animals that day, we did spot some big cougar tracks fresh in the snow and we didn’t go home empty handed. I shot my first “prairie chicken”, a Spruce Hen, and we cooked it up for dinner that night when we got home. It was delicious. We will be back out again to try our luck for an elk or buck!
Dan even caved the other day and put the snow blade on Randy to clear out the driveway.
We had enough snow that we needed the plow…in October! With the plow being on Randy, we decided to take Suzi-Q out yesterday to check our cameras in the back. She is a great little truck, but for this winter weather we are having she sits just a little too low in the snow. We may have found ourselves stuck several times, but thankfully she comes fully equipped with a winch!
It hasn’t been all bad though. The snow has given me the perfect reason to stay inside curled up by the woodfire, finishing up some knitting projects, catching up on all our fall shows and just spending
some quality time with the man I love and am going to spend the rest of my life with. It has brought out the inner house wife in me, with new baking ventures with cinnamon rolls and dinner projects with new chili recipes for fall.
I am afraid for how long this winter is going to be, and what it holds in store if it’s decided to start already in October. But we are all prepared here to make it through a long, cold winter. We have the pantry stocked, in the next month with hunting season coming we will have a full freezer along with the butchered meat pigs and with the wood fire we will never be cold. The animals are well on their way to being winter ready and we are prepared for the elements. Mother Nature…bring it on. We are ready! 
