Bye 2008! Hi 2009!

Bye 2008! Hi 2009!

2008 was amazingly good to and for both of us. Tom is stable and feeling fine, the chickens are doing well, Katherine has learned to knit cables, and the island is wonderful.

Tom spent a good deal of time going to Boston for treatments, though that has calmed down to once every three weeks. (You can find all the details about his medical journey as they happen in his Ruminations on this blog or the collected version on our web site upislandeggs.com/Ruminations.htm

We borrowed broody hens and let them hatch out eggs for us. Out of that batch came a truly amazing rooster who battles the crows who swoop down trying to grab the chicken treat. Our suspicion to one of the tricks to having a well-behaved non-aggressive-to-people rooster is to have a mixed breed rooster with lots of Dorking and Brahma in his background and let a very friendly gentle hen raise him. This seems to work better than using pure-breed roosters and us doing the raising.

It is hard to resist taking a hand in the raising though, particularly when the chicken is willing to help Katherine play World of Warcraft (Zaw, 80, Echo Isles).

The summer and fall were full of our traditional weaving & spinning demos at the Fair, helping the Ag Society to get a barn built by the Amish, and a wonderful trip to New York City. Our cooking took one of those occasional leaps forward – Tom adapted the famous no-knead bread recipe to perfection, Katherine mastered English muffins, and we realized that the Swiss style cheeses we make are some of our best. So we have started tweaking them and came up with very memorable Saffron Swiss and Caraway-Cumin Swiss (there is a Dill Swiss aging now – we have high hopes!)

And the ever present conundrum on what to take to parties and picnics in 2008 was solved by skewered stuff – we must have made 6 or 8 skewery things, sometimes with shrimp, sometimes with steak. The Solstice party was held in the middle of an impressive snow storm but Island folk are a hearty bunch and can, mostly, drive in snow so the party went on and was one of our better efforts.

2008 kept the guest bedroom filled up with friends and family – nice visits and new perspectives. Katherine turned out lots of chemo hats and in doing so finally learned to knit regular and bi-color cables (lace knitting is still unconquered territory.) Tom is weaving linen chenille hand towels on his big loom and goes curling twice a week when schedule permits. This time of year Tom is doing interviews of lower Cape and Island kids applying to Columbia.

As for 2009, in January we will celebrate out 30^th anniversary! Wishing you a glorious New Year!