After our quick ride we came back to the house and while Erin was working on school work I started hauling wood for the first time this fall.  I loaded up both the inside and outside wood boxes and got the stove filled up ready for a match.  Here is a bit of a photo progression of the work.

All this work because the outside world is beginning to look like this….

After skiing I hauled wood to fill up the “wood box” outside our house. Then I relaxed and took a sauna.

We’ve had a nice amount of snow this year so far.  I’ve only been out skiing once though.    I am hoping to ski at least three times a week in the coming months.  I may have blogged about this already, but I’m not sure.  Jesse and I built a sauna this summer.  We’ve been using it quite a bit and I’m really excited to use it after skiing this year.

Well.  I hope to blog more often in 2011.  We’ll see how that goes.

At home Erin and I have been enjoying our time on the lake.  Weekend boat rides dubbed the “Apple Cider Tour” are taken frequently.  We have been using the suana on almost a daily basis.  It is so nice to come home from work and relax in the sauna.  We are still jumping in the lake to cool off from time to time, but those swims sure are getting shorter and shorter.  We’ll see if I am crazy enough to jump in this winter.

Here is glimpse of what our neck of the woods looks like this time of year.

On the BWCACAST front, I’m still kicking out episodes from the summer trips.  I’m currently releasing episodes from the trip we took in July with my parents.  I have one ready to release this coming Tuesday, so be sure to drop by the site and check it out.  I’ve also got a couple of really fun episodes in the works.  First I did an interview with a man named Joe Priatle from Ely.  He’s 91 years old and has been making snowshoes for 70 of them.  He was kind enough to allow me to film him re-rawhiding a pair of snowshoes my Uncle Zac gave me.  It was a lot of fun watching him start out with the rawhide straps in what seemed to be a haphazard criss-cross and evolve into an amazing web.  I’ve also had the good fortune to team up with www.blackriversleds.com.  They make a very nice toboggan sled for winter camping.  They sell the sleds completed or you can buy a kit from them.  I’ve partnered up with them to do an episode on putting one of their kits together.  I’ve got all the parts and hope to shoot putting it together this coming weekend.  With the sled finished up we are planning a winter camping trip in the middle of February.  I don’t think we’ll go very far back into the BWCA, because we’ll be leaving after school on Friday and have to be back by Monday.  It should be a good time though.

School has been going well.  Our student broadcasts seem to fluctuate from week to week with more and less professional shows.  For whatever reason some of my students feel that everything needs to be funny and joking around takes precedence over just about anything else in their lives.  I continue to work with them to provide a quality news program once a week.  My web design students are great to work with.  We keep plugging away at a variety of php mysql open source cms’s, blogs, galleries, and soon wiki’s.  On a side not I’m really hoping for a snow day tomorrow.  Its been snowing since last evening and doesn’t plan to stop until tomorrow at 4:00 PM.  The National Weather Service says we shouldn’t drive unless we really need to and yet our school district hasn’t made the decision to close school for tomorrow.

Erin and I spent yesterday making venison snack sticks.  We kind of got a late start on things.  But we took 10 lbs of venison, 8 lbs of lean burger, and 2 lbs of pork.  Ground them all up together.  Split into two 10 lbs batches we added in the seasonings for a pepper batch, and a hot batch.  It then took us about an hour to stuff the first batch into collagen casings.  Once stuffed we hung the snack sticks in a smoker and smoked them for 3 hours.  During that time we stuffed the second batch.  When the first batch was done smoking we put them in the oven at 200 degrees to finish them off.  The second batch went into the smoker.  This all went down around 9:00 PM.  It took over 3 hours for the first batch to reach the recommended 160 degree internal temperature.  Sot it was 12:15 AM before I was able to take them out of the oven and put the second batch in for their cooking time.  I ended up having to get up at 2 Am, 3 AM, 4 AM, and finally 4:30 AM before the second batch was done and I could turn off the stove and get some good sleep.  Needless to say I took a nap today.

This past week seemed to go pretty quick.  I think when your down in the trenches it can seem like its moving awfully slow, but when you look back you seem to forget those times.  Anyway it was a good week.  I went to a wrestling meet on Tuesday night and watched a few of my students who are on the Virginia high school wrestling team.  It was fun to see them compete.  They did a very nice job winning both of their dual meets.  I went to the meet after our weekly curling match.  Tony our high school art teacher, Chuck our superintendent, Tom one of our P.E. teachers and myself all curl in the early league.  We’ve competed three times so far and are sitting at 2 for 3.  I played pretty well our last game getting most of my rocks in the general area they were supposed to be, so that was good.

On Friday I was signed up to take tickets at the hockey game.  Since I was tied up with this Erin spent the evening making lefsa.  It turned out really well and I think she ended up getting about 70 pieces.  The hockey game was fun to watch.  Virginia beat International Falls after a bit of a shaky start.

Saturday night Erin and I went to her schools Christmas party at the wooden table.  It was fun spending time with the people she works with on a daily basis.  After dinner we headed to Hibbing to pick up Katie who was just finishing up about 28 hours of travel getting down here from St. Michael for her Christmas break.

Today we did a little bit of ice skating.  I don’t know how the rink will be tomorrow.  We got a little bit of snow this evening.  It seems the moment you get the ice cleared enough for skating mother nature decides to spoil the fun by dropping more of that white stuff.  There us rumored to be a pretty big storm that is supposed to hit us on Christmas eve.  If that’s the case we need to make sure we take advantage of the skating while its available.

Erin has two days of work this week and I have three, so our Christmas break is just around the corner.  I am really looking forward to relaxing and getting outside some over break.

I hope you all have a nice holiday season