Cooking the "M"

A bunch of us over on 'the facebook' had a pretty good laugh this weekend about a recent news story. As I was tromping thru the house when I caught the last part of a story about some folks who were raided by the police. The local boys got a tip from a neighbor that some folks were cooking up some meth right there in their yard. The raid ensued.

Turn out the only "M" they were cooking was...... maple syrup. Not meth. Just pancake topping. There's a lot of material here and tons of jokes to be made.

The joke was on me tho - for the last two days I've been cooking up my own "M" out in the yard.

At first I thought this happened in Ohio - the news story named a county near mine - but then I saw this was actually in Illinois. I have to say these folks took the whole thing much better than I would have. I might have been able to talk my way out of meth charge... but I probably would have gone down hard on "resisting." I'd be laughing too hard to cooperate if the local police didn't know the difference between a meth lab and making maple syrup.

Luckily for me, if I was hauled off to the pokey, I found out I had some blog friends who would come and post bail - even if they had to pay my bond with a sack of ducks. 

Dog#1 - always helpful.

Saturday was probably one of the most fun days we've had on the farm in a long time. After all the tapping we finally started cooking down all the syrup on a bigger scale then just a couple gallons.  I was not raided by the police.

Shine came and helped. Mostly he just looked disinterested.

I sat outside with my best dog and my favorite barncat and tended the fire most of the day. It started out a blue sky day but then the snow started. What could be more farmy then cooking down maple syrup in the snow?

The local cardinal came to see what was going on about the time the snow started.

Happy Sunday everyone! Any body else got in danger of being raided for cooking the "M"?