Ice Mountains on Saginaw Bay

Last weekend we drove to the Bay City Recreational Area to have a look at all of the ice that has been pushed up from Lake Huron onto land. This didn't only happen here, but also in some residential areas where ice was pushed up into houses, through windows and walls. There were some photos in the newspaper of people with ice in their living rooms. We didn't see any of that, but from the shape of these ice mountains, you can imagine how that could happen if your house was very close to the shore.



















Here you can see over the ice mountain out onto the Saginaw Bay. There are more mountains of ice out in the bay.



















The surface of the ice had a neat crazed pattern, and was very glassy.



















Here is some older ice, it looks more white than clear. And you can see the sheets of ice that have been pushed up from the water.



















Here are some more crystally, sparkly, glass ice mountains. When the ice started to fall down like an avalanche, it even sounded like broken glass.

As seen in Bay City, Michigan

Living in a bunny's paradise









These guys are the only thing to make life in Michigan bearable. The bunnies. After noticing bunny tracks in the snow all winter, we weren't surprised to establish that there seems to be a high concentration of bunnies in our neighborhood. We were surprised, however, that these bunnies are not only Eastern Cottontails, as pictured above, but precious dwarf rabbits in black, gray, and white with black spots. In all my previous life in Beaverton, I had only witnessed Eastern Cottontails, and now living on the other side of town, I am seeing precious, multicolored dwarf rabbits in the wild! One of our neighbors even reported that years ago, these rabbits were so abundant that they were hopping around everywhere in the morning when he went to his car to go to work and wouldn't even hop away from people. Could we have found heaven?
The current bunnies do hop away, and seem to only live near vacant houses. I am pretty sure that one of the people on our street thinks we are sizing up the houses on the street to break into them and steal stuff, because we regularly drive and walk down the road to check on the bunnies, stopping in the middle of the street and staring onto property that does not belong to us. That is suspicious in America. You are not normal if you go out and observe precious bunnies in the wild, you are a burglar.
The biggest bunny news today: not only did we see all 5 of the precious buns (the gray one, the two brown ones, the black one and the one with cow spots), we also found baby bunny tracks in the snow on our front step! We had a tiny bunny visitor this morning who hopped right up onto our front step! The prints were very small, but definitely from a bunny, so we are very excited. Our master plan of capturing a baby bunny and taming it will soon be reality.

The Bread

After eating lots of bad bread that tasted of dough conditioners and other assorted additives, and basically had no texture or substance anyway, someone started baking bread. After a few months of experimentation and travels from Gladwin, Michigan, to Windsor, Canada, in search of the perfect flour, here are the results:

germanbread.blogspot.com

Who knew I would marry a passionate baker?