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| This photo about sums up the weather this month--cloudy and threatening rain almost every day, |
This morning is slightly cloudy but not too cold at 42 degrees. Yesterday the power was off --it went off about 4pm Saturday during some really bad winds and rain and didn't get restored until after 1 in the afternoon on Sunday. Overnight it was so warm--the temperature didn't drop below 48, and so far in this new year that's been the norm: temperatures much higher than normal.
For us a power outage is an inconvenience, but not too bad. We were at our booth in Marietta so didn't get home until about 7pm. We got out the battery lanterns and the buckets. The buckets went under the downspouts and we had 5 gallons of water for flushing the toilet in no time. We had jugs of drinking water stored so that was not a problem. Missed our showers, though!
We left the fridge tightly closed, and sat outside on the porch, having wine (for me) and Guinness (for him). We listened to the rain, petted the dogs, talked and enjoyed just being out there. After a while we came inside and Larry lit a fire in the fireplace. So we sat in the log room and talked some more. You'd think that being together all day we'd have nothing left to say, but we always have things to discuss. We went to bed earlier than usual, and I have to admit it felt absolutely sinful to sleep so long. But it felt good.
In the morning we took out leftover sausage gravy and sausage we'd made for breakfast Saturday because a friend was here hunting (flintlock season, I believe), and he enjoys a good breakfast. I warmed those up and also warmed up the leftover biscuits by putting them in a iron skillet with a lid over a burner on the gas cookstove (it works without electricity, yay for vintage stoves!). I let the skillet just get warm, then turned off the flame. The biscuits came out beautifully warmed, almost like fresh. Eggs, coffee, tomato juice and pumpkin butter rounded out our meal--all of it except the coffee and biscuit ingredients home-raised. Love those kind of meals.
I washed dishes by boiling rainwater and adding a little bleach, cleaned up the kitchen and took our coffee out on the porch where we made our plans for the day. Pruning apple trees, starting work on cleaning out the workroom (a real nightmare, that room is!), and some painting projects for me. Larry started the generator and plugged in the fridge for a little while.
My current project. The first photo is after Larry removed bad veneer, repaired as needed and sanded.
In progress:
Deciding on which color to go with for the top, sides and drawers.
We were working on the workroom when the electric came back on. We were so busy we didn't notice for a while, until I went inside and noticed the twinkle lights on the shelf in the living room were on.
The years of living without electricity here seem to have built in some automatic responses. We shift back to our old ways of doing things pretty easily. Having free gas helps, as we have heat and can cook despite an outage. I miss the gas fridge, though--it was nice to not have to worry about food spoiling.
Today we're back to normal. Today's to-do list looks pretty much the same as yesterdays, as all of those tasks are still in progress. At least we have light, and my computer works so I can write this post.
Catchup weather history for this month:
January 2020
1: 45, 34
2.:52, 34
3: 53,50 showers
4: 51,34 showers, flurries
5: 41, 33 showers, flurrlies
6: 45, 28 showers, flurries
7: 45, 27 showers
8: 40, 26
9: 55, 23
10: 64, 50
11: 77, 59 wild wind and rain
12: 58, 42 rain in the wee hours, then mostly cloudy
13: today is nice, about 58, and no rain! There's even a wee bit of sunshine.
For a look at some weather folklore, check out this post I wrote a while back:
Speaking of the Weather
Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
I always enjoy your tales of life in your neck of the woods.
ReplyDeleteIt has been rainy, rainy, rainy here. I've been taking my winter D3, so I don't get the winter blues. My sister in law suffers with it greatly, she is thinking red light therapy may help her. I wonder if some of the winter blues is how one looks at life.
No power outages so far, thankfully. Everything in the hovel is electric... ugh. Miss having a gas stove and fireplace.
I like the sound of your days. We had terrible storms, but didn't lose electricity, like we usually do. We have a generator and wood stove, that we have cooked on a few times. Nothing like being self sufficient.
ReplyDeleteI remember this.... From someone else... You can get your free gas, down south. -smile-
ReplyDeleteSince you lived without it, it's easy for you to slip back into the routine.
But it would be a lot harder, up north.
🔥💛🔥
I'm accustomed to losing power here, too, and don't mind the inconvenience as long as I've got enough water in buckets to keep the animals alive. But as you say, the fridge and freezer are a big concern. We lost power for five days after an early storm this Winter, and my freezer was chockablock full of meat. I covered the whole freezer in quilts and tried not to fret about it since there was not a thing I could do. What a relief to find that everything was still frozen solid below the top inch of the freezer, which was an entire layer of gel-filled icepacks that I use for my aching joints!
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