Well, there’s now a statewide hunker down order. Which for me basically means to carry on and business as usual.
I got up early to check on the bagel dough I made last night. It looked ready enough to me. So I made it into a dozen bagels and put the dough in the fridge.
Then I found the smallest pair of cross country skis we had – some old hickory wood skis with 3 pin bindings that were Sara’s. I hoped these would work for skate skis for Sam. I removed the old bindings and mounted NNN bindings I just got in the mail for another pair of my skis so they’d fit Sam’s boots.
I made salmon berry jelly later in the morning from some juice I didn’t see when I made cherry and high bush cranberry jellies earlier in the week from other juices saved in the freezer.
Later in the afternoon, I made my first batch of sourdough bagels using starter from Laura. Wow, are they good and seem pretty hard to mess up. They just take a couple days to make and they aren’t gonna last long so I need to make several batches at a time and freeze the rest.
Then my daily cross country ski at Eagle Crest. The groomer was working the trail as we got there and it was fantastic. Unfortunately, the skis didn’t work for Sam as they acted like classic skis, even though I scraped off the old kick wax and put glide wax all the way down.
I got home and got a message from Sara that she’d be home from the legislature between 830 and 9 pm so I took out some ling cod from the freezer, planning to make deep fried.
Then the Juneau Police dispatcher called. Did I want to get a deer for the Salvation Army Foodbank? You bet I do. Where is it, I ask. She gives me the address, and it’s literally walking distance from the house. So I get knives and tarps and buckets together in the garage, and head out to find the deer.
It took me awhile to find it in the waning daylight, but there she was in the ditch. Still warm.
I put her on a tarp I keep in the car for this purpose and drove the 100 yards back to the house.
When I open the deer up to remove the innards, something looked out of place. Like there was something extra. And there was. A fetal buck and doe. Twins. And not far from being born.
Sara pulls up from a long, long day at the Capital, and when I tell her about the twins, she calls her former colleague at the high school who is a biology teacher to see if he wants them.
I pile the innards into a bucket, and save the heart and liver.
I pull the deer up by the neck on at rope through the pulley mounted in the ceiling that lives there for that purpose, and soon have the hide off and into another bucket. Then I yard the deer all the way to the ceiling so it should be out of the reach of any weasels or marten around the house. The temperature is perfect for hanging, and the deer will be fine there for days.
Back at the house, I put the heart and liver in a bowl of cold water and add salt to draw out the blood. Then I email Shane, the current Salvation Army major here with his wife, and tell him I’ve got a deer for the food bank. I tell him about the fetuses, and am sure to copy the former major Dana, who gets squeamish just by the word blood, and her husband Lance, who will be happy I did.
The deer meat could not have come at a better time with so many people suddenly out of work.