Matching Grandsons

After the full day of killing, Phil awoke Saturday feeling like he'd been beaten with a baseball bat. And the rain that had started on Friday night as soon as the guys were done with their work had turned into a steady, almost inch of rain by Saturday morning. Cold, dreary, wet.

When Phil couldn't find his marvelous how-to butcher DVD (despite knowing where he'd seen it last), he headed back to bed.

An hour or two later, he awoke, looked in the spot again and found his DVD, so he went out to butcher. I think it was sometime after 3pm, though my sense of time could be skewed.

He began to saw the carcass in half with his saw, but when his headed felt like it would spin off, I took over. It takes an incredible number of back and forth saw strokes to saw through five feet of pig backbone. Seriously.

But after the hog was split and Phil began to butcher on his special butcher table, he made both primal cuts (dividing the pig half into main sections) and the specialty cuts, and wrapped all the pieces in butcher paper by 7:30pm, working by just a lamp the last hour.

I ground the sausage meat, just shy of 60 pounds. And since last time the sausage was a bit coarse, when I ran the meat through the KitchenAid grinder once, I ran this meat through twice. It took a long time.

Then I rendered the fat (only eight or nine quarts, so a bit less than before) and cleaned a bit, but it was midnight, so I headed to bed.

(But I must say: I watched the first three episodes of the A&E Wooster and Jeeves series and I laughed out loud over and over. What a great last three hours of processing!)

We woke today to a hard, killing freeze. All the basil is done for the year. It was cold in the house: we hadn't turned the heater up quite enough, and I suspected I could see wisps of my breath. Brr.

But the weather turned sunny, and the boys looked smashing in their new sweaters, courtesy of Phil's mom. When we walked into church, we heard a noticeable stir. One of our friends came up and said, "That was the highlight of my morning, watching those boys come in. The Lykoshes have arrived!"

And though I took 84 photos of the boys, with Jadon the photo-hater, Isaiah's attempts to cross his eyes or stick out his tongue, and Joe aping all his older brothers did (or simply being oblivious), it wasn't easy to get a good shot of them in their true cuteness.

Such is life.

And a few photos from earlier this week. The colors really popped finally, especially the red maple leaves.

We have three pigs left to deal with.

After seeing Isaiah's termite mound, and hearing Isaiah's wish for slightly different capabilities, Phil bought some new tips for the Dremel tool. Jadon went right to work on something.

And Jadon was quite proud of his tower. He must have been quite proud, as he's neither grimacing nor running away in this photo, so do admire it well.