Cabin fever?

It’s been a miserable weather time for over the last four days.  I worked on Friday helping to clean a big storage area at headquarters, but once I got home I’ve pretty much been stuck inside.  I’ve made the occasional venture out with Emma, or to take garbage to the dumpster, or a quick trip to the grocery store, but other than that I’ve stayed dry and warm inside the rig.  The result is I had nothing to blog about. 

Today’s highlight was that a blue jay finally stopped by the Hard Rock Bird Café.  Lots of folks don’t like blue jays, and think of them as bullies at their feeders.  I like them.  Keeping the bully theory in mind, here’s a couple of trivial facts about this bird species.  When I was banding birds and captured a blue jay in a mist net you might expect that the bird would put up quite a fight.  The opposite was true.  They seemed to be stunned, and banding them was a breeze.  The pleasant little black-capped chickadee, on the other hand, fought beak and nail when trapped.  What spitfires chickadees are!  So, in my opinion, blue jays are like many other bullies… all bluster, but wusses (sp?) at heart. 

Now here’s the other astounding fact.  Blue jays, bluebirds, and other birds with blue feathers aren’t really blue at all.  If you hold one of their feathers up to the sun, they are actually black.  That blue color is due to the refraction/reflection of light.  I tell you these fascinating little things for two reasons.  One, so you can dazzle your friends and family during holiday gatherings when there’s a lull in conversation.  And secondly, because I have a wee touch of cabin fever from being isolated for these many days.    Emma just doesn’t appreciate my babbling…

The other excitement today was to find this killdeer outside my window as I sat reading blogs at my table.  Lately, Gypsy has been talking about BLTs and meatloaf on her posts.  That sparked me to fix myself a BLT, and to think about meatloaf.  One of her readers suggested making individual sized portions of mini meatloaves in a muffin pan.  That sounded like a good idea to me; just the right size.  However, when I checked my old muffin pan it was rather rusted and unappealing inside the cups.  I ditched it.  Instead, I’m going to use some of those disposable mini loaf pans.  Each loaf will be about a half pound before baking, but I can use the left overs for cold meatloaf sandwiches.  Sounds like a winner to me.  My secret to a tasty moist meatloaf is to make a few indentations in the top of each and put cold bacon grease in the holes before baking.  I made up four of them, and put three in the freezer.  I plan to bake them one at a time, but I’m just not sure how long to do a mini meatloaf in the convection oven.

Does anyone other than me keep a jar of bacon grease in their refrigerator?  If I fry up some bacon, I always keep the grease.  Back when I was little, there was always a jar of bacon grease in the ice box.  Times were not always easy, and my grandmother would sometimes fix us cold bacon grease sandwiches for lunch.  Waste not, want not when you’re on a tight budget!

Enough rambling for tonight.  Hopefully the weather will be a bit better tomorrow, and I’ll have something other than bacon grease and meatloaf to talk about.

Thanks for stopping by… talk to you later,  Judy