Seeds, tree tapping, night visitor & sickness

What a week around here, good and bad. My big seed order came in the mail today so that was a sweet surprise. Some workhorse seeds ( I need to can lots of tomatoes and freeze greens) and some fun things to try (loofah gourds)

The maple trees are producing wonderfully. Here is another 10 gallons of sap to go across town to my parents freezers. I think that brings the total up to 20 gallons so far. The conversion rate is apparently 40 gallons sap equals 1 gallon maple syrup. I'd like to hit 40 gallons just for research purposes but if we run out of space and containers will take what I can get. Although a gallon of syrup would happily meet the needs of both households. 

The water jugs are working fine but every one of them has needed reinforced by some kind of string to hold the jugs on. Twine and clothesline are working well because I can just stretch the cording to empty the jugs as opposed to unknotting them every day.

I made a quiche this morning as we had planned to have a friend over for brunch but had to cancel as we are all sick with colds.

Sick bed/nest made up on the couch.  The illness hit yesterday afternoon.  I

 was laying down with the baby last night on the couch. He was unhappy, coughing and crying. Bee kindly laid down beside us and he fell asleep petting her.

We did dye eggs in a moment of feeling well.  I just noticed both kiddos are in this picture.

And have this stir-fry dinner made with teriyaki tofu from Aldi's. This was before we all completely lost out appetites.

Both of the geese have been laying. I have 4 eggs saved up to incubate. The oldest goose was attacked my something while she was out on Thursday evening. I found her laying out in yard while it was sleeting. She has puncture wounds on her throat and is slow, but drinking and honking softly. I'm  guessing the culprit is the neighbor's dog. It runs around constantly, is here most days, is pooping in our yard and has already been hit by a car once. Not pleased with this situation at all but there is nothing I can do about it. The usual country method of SSS doesn't work if your entire yard is on display from the road. Am I serious? The dog has been on our front porch. I found a huge goose half dead. We have two small kids.  I don't know this animal. I honestly wish people would just leash their damn dogs.

Random picture from the week, I think we were watching my husband grill dinner.

The upside (I guess) to the whole sickness thing is that the oldest and I have been watching a ton of PBS cartoons. There was an episode of Nature Cat today about fossils and we got out these books and some of our fossils to look at. That natural history museum book was an absolute favorite of his when he was about 2 years old and he still loves it. That tiny fossil on the far right is, no kidding, a corpolite which is a fancy term for fossil dinosaur poop.

The game cameras have been set up again and aside from lots of pictures of birds we did catch these good ones:

Hello Mr. Fox. I say Mr. because it's been around for years but we've never gotten a picture of kits. I think he mostly keeps to himself. 

Well, here's looking forward to a new week full of health and no dog attacks, hopefully.