Pancake anyone?

There's nothing finer on a cold (-39C) weekend morning than sleeping in, being brought a hot mug of coffee to sip while reading in bed and having one's spouse get up specifically to whip up a batch of buttermilk pancakes.

Friday news brief

Our final buttermilk tally is 101 litres, most of it now frozen in boxes and cartons on our balcony. That's over $400 of free milk! Hurrah!

The sun isn't rising until almost 10:30 in the morning as we count down to the time when it doesn't rise at all (see ticker in sidebar). I think this is pretty darn cool, and am really glad TheMan North has as many lights on his bike as he does and am glad for the chains he's put on both tires as they really help grip on the ice and snow. Yep, he's still riding it to work and back, although one of these days he'll start snowshoing or skiing instead. (Thanks muchly to Steph and The Boy, as we used your wedding gift to buy the supplies to make the chains.)

There's been a meme circulating around some of the blogs I read now and then and it asks blog owners to post 5 phrases (with or without quotation marks) that return their own blog as the first listed in a google search. Phrases that put Sojourn North at the top were: loud sinus clearing event, TheManNorth, curious corvids under a tarp, "que maniacal laughter" and "shopping for a skidoo at your local grocery store". Only the last two phrases needed quotation marks.

We've had a few mornings with heavy ice fog here in NorthernTown and the hoar frost has just been INCREDIBLE! I took some photos midday after the first frost and thought you just might enjoy a few of them.

Got Milk?

We do!

Que maniacal laughter....

We've recently acquired 14 litres of buttermilk and plan to get at least as much, if not double that amount more, all for free! Hurrah! (Normally we'd have to pay over $4 a litre.)

Have you plundered a dairy you ask? NooOOOooo silly reader, we're one of a few thousand beneficiaries of someone's big mistake: A local grocery store accidentally added a few additional zeros when ordering more supplies recently. They were alerted to this when a transport truck arrived in town with their order in the form of Twelve thousand litres of buttermilk (instead of the 12 litres or so they'd intended on purchasing) and the store is giving it away for free instead of throwing it out. Today I asked a clerk how much of the order has been given out since it arrived last week and she said that approximately half of the order remains and that it is moving slowly. However, considering that the store typically only sells 4 or 5 litres a week, getting rid of 6, 000 litres, albeit for free, in the same time seems rather quick to me.

Along with most of the town, we're now hunting up buttermilk recipes, other than for use in pancakes, for which TheManNorth has a killer recipe of his own. (Feel free to share favourite buttermilk recipes of your own or send me a link, if you like.)

Why couldn't they return the order? Aside from the lengthy time it would take to do so is that there wasn't time to make arrangements for it before highway transport became impossible. The ferries that carry highway traffic across two local rivers have just stopped running as the rivers are icing up and the only way in and out until the ice is thick enough for the ice roads to be ready (about a month from now) is by air.