Cold and Colder

2°f, about -16 C, dropping to -6°f tonight. Light snow earlier this evening.

I am feeling kinda sorry for the South tonight. I mean, 10 inches of snow in New Orleans?? Isn't that unheard of? I have read that it will melt within a day or two but still. I have joked that it's just payback for them sending their heat up here last summer, but I can only imagine how disruptive and dangerous this snowfall must be. And at the same time I hear from my northern friends that their snow has gone missing this year. I guess we all know where it is.

We had a really quiet day today. I was up way too late last night because when temperatures are below zero I tend to want to be awake to look after the house. That's silly, but there it is.  I am the same in any threatening weather. I want to keep my house safe, even though in truth there often isn't much I can do. Except in this case: I can have extra water in buckets in case the power goes off, I can keep the fire in the fireplace going, make sure the heat is turned up high enough,, let the pets in and out, monitor the dripping faucets to be sure they continue to drip,  etc. It gives me peace of mind, anyway. 

Larry doesn't worry at all. He tucks deep into the blankets, and he's asleep by 8:30pm. But he was raised in a poorly built, drafty coal camp house where the water froze in the buckets they carried into the house from the dug well.  While the big old 1900 foursquare I was raised in wasn't the warmest house in the world, we never had to deal with cold like that. 

So anyway, my energy was low today. Larry had a doctor appointment scheduled in Charleston but we called and changed it to a telephone appointment, so that took up a good bit of the morning by the time they went through all his medications and so on. It helps that I could be there to hear what they said because Larry usually doesn't tell me much. 

I packed up some ebay sales in the afternoon, and made a ham-broccoli-rice-cheese casserole and a fruit salad for dinner. The casserole used up some leftover ham, and some rice I froze a couple months ago. I added sautéed onions and celery, a can of mushroom soup and some nacho cheese sauce, both bought for Christmas cooking but never used. Mixed it all together with some seasoning salt, stuck it in the oven for 45 minutes, topped with shredded cheddar, popped it back in for 10 minutes, and done. Very tasty and rib-sticking on this cold day. The fruit salad was just sliced bananas that needed to be used up, strawberries ditto, and a jar of zucchini pineapple I canned last summer. 

I did finish my most recent book too. I had tried to read The Last Dickens by Matthew Pearl, but could not get into it at all, just did not like his style of writing, and I felt like he was telling me things rather than showing me, a cardinal sin in writing fiction. So I put it down and picked up an old Victoria Holt novel, Menfreya in the Morning . Now that was a good read, even though the heroine was the formulaic Jane Eyre type. But just good writing! Next up is another Christmas murder mystery, An Unfortunate Christmas Murder,which apparently is part of The Dinner Ladies mystery series. I have never heard of this series, and ten pages in I can tell you that the author, Hannah Hendy,  is no Victoria Holt.  We shall see if the story holds my interest, even if the writing is underwhelming.

I had nice long conversations with my three older sons the past couple of days, all of them checking in to see how the old folks are doing. My oldest asked if we were thinking again about moving. I wonder if they are worrying that we are getting too old for this place and this lifestyle? We had talked seriously about moving before the pandemic and were even looking at houses, but when Covid erupted on the scene we just battened down, and decided that we were very lucky to be where we were. We have no intention of moving anytime soon, barring any unforeseen occurrence of course. We realized how much we value our privacy and being surrounded by nature as we are, and being able to garden, have chickens and pets and plenty of space between us and any other house. It would be a difficult transition to have to deal with neighbors and traffic and having to pay for so many things we have for free here. So no, no plans to move just yet. Maybe in 10 years.

Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.