Life as a Spectator Sport

As in when the power was out for over 24 hours and the phone for longer than that.

Number 1--it isn't enough to have a wood-burning stove. You also need wood. I had lots of wood, a face cord of it, in fact. Except for three pieces, it was all outside covered with snow. I spent a lot of the 24 hours nursing that cold wet wood into burning, and much of the heat went to drying it out instead of warming me up.

My next road trip is going to be to Plow and Hearth up north of Charlottesville, and I'll be coming home with an inside wood rack, an outside wood rack with a cover, and a box of fatwood fire starter. Along with no wood inside, I also had very little kindling. In retrospect, it's a wonder I got a fire started at all. I have a big basket near the stove, in which there were the aforementioned three pieces of wood, a handful of kindling and some newspaper. From now on, the basket will be full of kindling, I'll have the fatwood for backup, and there will be at least three days of wood in the inside rack. The stove takes about a log an hour, something I also learned this weekend. I'd never used it for a long enough period before to find that out.

Number 2--I can indeed heat the trailer comfortably with this stove. But we must figure out why it isn't drawing properly with the door closed. Bill thinks it needs another chimney section. I think it needs a lot fewer trees around it. Since I wanted to get rid of some of the trees anyway, that will be the first thing we try. I'm reluctant to put any more weight on the roof if that isn't absolutely necessary. But it was a great relief to see just how well the stove works, in spite of having to leave the door open.

Number 3--I must have a gas-powered chain saw. There are six trees down in the driveway, and even with the power back on and using the full two hundred feet of heavy-duty extension cord, I could reach only two of them with my electric chain saw. I'm trapped here until someone can clear them away for me. Bill will do that eventually, but I really need to get out tomorrow.

Number 4--I must have some kind of hand-powered charger for the phone. I know they're available. I nursed the Blackberry along by turning it off when I didn't actually have to use it, but it would have been much nicer to have left it on. For whatever reason, my mobile charger decided not to work, so I couldn't even charge up the phone in the car. With the phone charged and a full charge on the laptop battery, I could have finished up the work that was supposed to have been turned in last night, instead of worrying about how I was going to get out of here and to some source of electricity today. And I must find the inverter, which would have allowed me to run the a/c phone charger in the car.

Tinkie decides to investigate the stove.


Tinkie deciedes NOT to investigate the stove. She's going to leap on top of it one of these days to get to the little heat-powered fan, and burn the heck out of her paws, I'm afraid. Note the snow-covered logs on the left.


The birds that turned their noses up at the hull-less sunflower seeds I put in the feeder last fall have decided it's edible after all. I saw numerous Carolina Chickadees and both a male and a female cardinal. I took this picture through the living room window; the faint white bars are a reflection of the venetian blinds in the window opposite this one.


Why I need a gas-powered chain saw. For those who know what they're looking at, the small brown rectangle in the distance is the tobacco barn, with two more trees lying across the driveway in front of it. I couldn't get any farther down the driveway on foot, but I could see at least two more fallen trees beyond that point.


My poor workshop, pretty much buried. I hoped the branches were simply weighted down by the snow and ice, but they actually broke off and are lying on the workshop roof. I haven't had a chance yet to see whether there was any damage to the roof.

Those trees have to go. One of them broke off near the top. If it had broken farther down, I wouldn't be writing this, because it would have fallen on the trailer. I wanted to take them out years ago, but Clarence objected, saying they kept the afternoon sun off the trailer. He may have been right about that, but he agrees now that keeping the trees themselves off the trailer would be better.


NOT the recommended way to operate a wood stove! But I had to get that wood dry somehow. I moved it all away from the stove any time I wasn't right in the same room. Talk about learning the hard way.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Changes coming from Blogger

For years I've hosted my own blog, at my own domain. Blogger has alerted users like me that they will no longer support FTP file uploads through Blogger. Instead, they offer Blogspot (which I stopped using very early on), and something called Custom Domains. Custom Domains allow you to keep your own site, but Blogger does the hosting instead of whoever you're already using. I haven't figured out exactly how this works yet, and I also don't know whether I'll still have FTP access independent of Blogger to get to the other files I have on this domain. So changes are coming, but exactly what form they will take I'm not yet certain. Stay tuned.

Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Cooking without a kitchen

I've made many a meal outside of official kitchens--when I used to go backpacking, when I lived on my small sailboat, and over the last few years, in a lot of hotel rooms. But they were temporary situations, with food chosen and packed for the specific occasions. Even when I lived on the boat, not much real cooking went on. Cold cereal for breakfast, canned soup and a sandwich for dinner, and somewhere in between, a fast food hamburger or fried chicken. Now I'm in my own home, where I would ordinarily be cooking three meals a day (if Clarence were here, at any rate), and I have no kitchen to do it in. So I've fallen back on electric utensils--the electric frying pan, crock pots and kettle that I already had, and the rice cooker and new tiny crock pot that I recently purchased. And somewhere in there, my attitude toward cooking (or rather, eating my own cooking) has completely changed.

I really enjoy cooking, but to be honest, by the time the meal is done, I'm sick and tired of playing with that particular food. I have no desire to look at what I've been preparing, or handle it, or even smell it, much less sit down and eat it. There have been times when I dished up Clarence's plate and carried it in to him, and then fixed myself a sandwich, just to have something different to eat than what I'd been laboring over. So cooking for myself has always been a problem.

Enter the crock pot and rice cooker, where food preparation and food consumption are separated by at least an hour, and suddenly I'm interested in my own cooking again. Lifting the lid on the crock pot that I loaded up this morning and finding a finished stew or meat loaf or casserole is almost like having someone else cook for me. The rice cooker can be started whenever I feel like it, and the rice stays warm until I'm ready to eat it. The electric frying pan, on its lowest setting, functions like a big flat crockpot. The tiny crockpot presents me with oatmeal in the morning, prepared just as I like it from real groats, with no recent effort on my part.

I suspect that even after I have a functioning kitchen again, I'm going to use my small electric appliances more than the stove. The only thing I refuse to give up is my French press coffee pot. Not only is the coffee far better than it would be in an automatic drip pot, but I've come to enjoy the morning ritual of putting on the kettle, grinding the coffee, spooning it into the pot and pouring in the boiling water. It would be nice if all the other rituals of cooking were equally enjoyable.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Slow progress toward having a kitchen again

Yesterday, snowbound and therefore released from other obligations (as in making the 80-mile trek to visit Clarence in the hospital), I put together the rolling kitchen cart that I bought last summer and then never had time to assemble. Its presence doubled the amount of counter and storage space in the kitchen. Today, I've been clearing out the front room so I can move the loom out of the living room.

Nothing more can happen in the kitchen until the section of flooring that is giving way is replaced and new floor covering put down, and that is a task I don't even want to contemplate. It's not just the kitchen, but the back hall that will be recovered, which means moving all my pantry shelving and the freezer, as well as the refrigerator, the kitchen shelving and the old altar table that serves as a buffet and general catch-all under the kitchen window. Where will it all go? Why, the living room, of course--the same living room that I am now trying so hard to clean out.

When the floor collapsed in the front room last summer, the big shelving unit in that corner tipped over and dumped its entire stash of canned goods on the floor. Some of it flew all the way to the doorway. It has all been sitting in the living room since then, waiting for the time when Bill could pull the carpet up and fix the floor. I finally gave up on that idea--the floor didn't seem to be getting any worse and there was no way I could completely empty out that room. So I concentrated on just moving the shelf to another part of the room (which meant rearranging other things, of course). And then I couldn't find part of it. The shelving had actually come apart when it tipped over, and some of the vertical support pieces had disappeared into the piles of other things in the room. Today, yay! I found the last missing vertical section and was able to put it back together, and I've been carrying loads of canned goods back into the room. I'll have the living room cleared out by tonight, just in time to start cluttering it up again with the contents of the kitchen, sigh.

Knitting is happening, though at a hit-and-miss pace. I've finished two pairs of socks and will take pictures and post them eventually. One sock of another pair is done, and the second sock begun. Sitting at Clarence's bedside has resulted in far more knitting than would have been done otherwise, if one is looking for a silver lining in that cloud.

Today I ordered the new sink for the kitchen, in the interest of having it on hand when the floor is fixed and new construction can begin. I've already told Bill that we're going to build the kitchen cabinets (or my version of kitchen cabinets, at any rate). He doesn't know we're also going to make the new countertops. I priced every imaginable variety of available countertop and decided against them all, for one reason or another. Granite, marble and the various kinds of "engineered stone" are all both too expensive and too hard. I don't like the shiny surface and I tend to drop things. I have too much good china and crystal to risk it on a granite countertop, even if I was willing to pay what that would cost. Formica is reasonably priced, but I didn't like any of it, even the more expensive special order versions. So Bill and I are going to make countertops from 2 x 10 pine boards. He will no doubt try to talk me out of that, but I've looked at the custom wood countertops you can buy from specialty companies, and it's entirely feasible. I've learned with him to present an idea, smile at his objections, and wait until he has time to think about it for a while. Then he comes back with, "You know, we could do . . . " and his suggestions are always good ones.

I have no idea whether he has ever glued up boards to make a larger width--his expertise in building tends to be on the rough construction side--but that's where I come in. He said once that every time he did a project for me, he learned something new, so this may turn out to be another of those learning experiences. In any case, I'll have beautiful open shelving instead of base cabinets where mousies can hide, and custom wood countertops at a far-less-than-custom price. Also far less than granite or Corian or anything similar. Less than home-center formica? Maybe not, but I'm willing to spend a little more to get something really good.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

We have kitties!

I said I wasn't sleeping at home again until there was at least one cat here, and I stuck to it. I'd spoken with several people about possibly taking one or two of their cats, but nothing worked out, so Shelley finally went to the SPCA shelter for me and picked out two cats.

This is Howie, who is actually a much prettier cat than he appears to be in this picture. He's huge, fluffy, and not amused at being unable to get outside. But he is also friendly, calm and undemanding.


Tinkerbell, on the other hand, is going to be interesting to live with. She's six months old and thinks the whole world is a cat toy, including Howie, me, and anything else she can reach. Clearly my loom is a wonderful cat toy, with dangling ends of yarn, jingly steel heddles, and movable wooden bits. Oddly, she's shown little interest in balls of yarn or works in progress. I may come home tomorrow to find all my half-knitted socks in chewed up pieces around the house, but I think not.

Nick will be coming over tonight to check on my new babies, make sure they have fresh food and water, and just spend some time with them. I hate having to leave them overnight on only the second night they've been here, but I had already committed to spending the night in Roanoke. And they seem to be settling in just fine, exploring everything (and so far not breaking anything). Tink knocked over a shelf that had been in the kitchen and was currently leaning against my laptop stand, but no damage was done. Considering the damage the mice have already done here, the kitties would have to go on a real rampage to even come close.

And I spent one whole night undisturbed by mice running around, which is worth even some amount of cat damage.

Friday, January 08, 2010

Nothing new

Once every six weeks or so seems to be my speed these days for posting to the blog. I've brought up Blogger a dozen times since November 21, and couldn't generate the energy to actually say anything.

I titled this post "Nothing new," but there actually are quite a few new things going on. One is that I decided to use Clarence's absence to do some renovating in the house that would have been difficult with him there (things requiring the power and water to be off for extended periods, among others). He had asked me to replace the hot water heater, and while I really didn't want to do that, it is his property. So I waffled on it until I figured out how I could do it without giving up that nice little corner that the hot water heater used to occupy and which I was now using for storage.

On a trip to the hardware store for another purchase, I happened to see a "lowboy" style of hot water heater that I thought would fit under the kitchen counter, in a corner that was pretty much inaccessible and therefore unused. In fact, the corner was on the other side of the wall from where the old hot water heater used to sit. Bill, I thought, could move the electric stove out of the way, cut a panel in the side of the cabinet, and install the hot water heater in the corner. That scenario turned out to be a bit naive (my underestimating the amount of new plumbing that would be required). But in fact, we ended up ripping out the whole cabinet, because after I purchased the hot water heater, it turned out to be too large in diameter to fit under the counter, even though the height wasn't a problem. I looked at the amount of mouse droppings under there, and the substantial hole around the sink plumbing where they had been getting in, and told Bill I didn't want to replace the base cabinet, even though that means I'll be without a sink for a while.

And then I looked at the equal amount of nasty stuff under where the stove had been, and the amount of insulation that the mice had pulled out of the oven, and told him to haul the stove to the dump along with the old sink base. Only two burners were working any more anyway, and the problem was not with the burners, but with the clips that held them in. They had corroded away, and at least one more wasn't going to last much longer. So I have no stove either for a while. I've decided to just use the hot plate and electric frying pan for the time being, and wash my dishes in the laundry tub in the bathroom. With Clarence not here, I'm not doing as much cooking at home as I used to anyway.

Since we were ripping things out already, I asked Bill whether he thought he could install a stack washer/dryer in the space where the old hot water heater had been. Perhaps a bit rashly, he said "Sure, no problem. Just have to pull this cable here, and run this water line there . . . " and he went off to consider the details while I went to Lowe's and bought a Samsung front loader and the matching dryer to stack on top of it. I suspect Bill was thinking of one of the small top loaders with a permananetly attached dryer when he assured me he could fit it all in that space, because the Samsung units have about two inches to spare on each side. Good thing Bill is skinny, because there is no way I will ever fit in there to turn the water off or unplug anything. And the combined washer/dryer is far too heavy for me to move it myself. Even Bill needed help with that. But he figured out how to do it. Thank God for intelligent, skilled, good-natured people like him. And thank God twice over that he lives near me, because he has come over there on more than one occasion to deal with a problem that came up while I was away.

The latest one of those is that the air handler portion of the heat pump died the evening before I was scheduled to leave on a four day business trip. I left the water running, crashed at Shelley's house, and went on to Richmond from there. It occurred to me somewhat belatedly that just leaving a faucet running wasn't going to be sufficient with the inside temperature rapidly approaching the same as the outside. So I called Bill, whined a bit, and he went over there, turned the water off, drained the system completely, and even emptied and reset the mouse traps. No amount of money is adequate pay for that kind of goodwill.

Speaking of mice--with the low temps outside, the mice have taken over. It's a war and they're winning. My intention right now is not to return to the house without at least one cat. We stopped up one hole after another and they're still getting in. Even worse, with the stove and countertops gone from the kitchen, they're running around in the bedroom. I could deal with them being in a different room while I slept. I'd wake up to hear a trap snapping every once in a while, but the most I had to deal with was one or more dead mice in the morning. The last few nights I slept at home, they were literally running around in the bedroom with me while I worked on the laptop or slept. That's just a bit too much. If I can't stop them getting in, I'm going to at least make the premises inhospitable to them. Shelley's cats, when they lived here, never caught a mouse, but their presence certainly decreased the number of mice that were tempted to move in.

The local HVAC people are coming next Wednesday to tell me how much a new air handler will cost. I think the problem is just the fan motor, as I can hear it humming and buzzing when I turn the system on. It might be possible to replace just that much, but this is the original air handler from 1978, so I might as well replace the whole durn thing. Ironically, I had already suspected that mice were using the hole where the refrigerant line comes in from the compressor, and was frustrated at the near impossibility of getting to it. Now that area will be exposed and I can plug the hole with steel wool and foam insulation. There are two more places in the house, in the front bathroom, where I know they're getting in, and that is next on the list of wholesale changes. I haven't used it as a bathroom in years, and I'm going to have Bill pull out the tub and toilet, stop up all the mouse access holes and fix what I'm sure is some rotten flooring under the tub, and then I'll use it as a big storage room.

I feel as though I'm giving in to consumerism to replace the hot water heater and buy a new washer and dryer. But if Clarence is able to come home, I won't be able to work any more. It's extremely unlikely that he'll be able to travel with me as he did before. He is on every-other-day dialysis, if for no other reason. So anything I think I might ever need must be done now while I have the money for it. Caring for a bed-ridden invalid is going to be immeasurably easier with a good quality washer and a dryer. There have been times already when I had two weeks worth of dirty clothing piled up because the weather was so awful I couldn't hang my wet laundry outside, and I wasn't home enough to dry it a load at a time on the drying racks inside. When you get home after dark and leave again in the morning at sunrise, and then it's raining or snowing as well, it's hard to deal with laundry without a dryer.

Speaking of Clarence, he is still hospitalized, still on a ventilator. He was moved a couple of weeks ago out of the ICU into a progressive care unit. The intention was to either wean him off the vent while he was still in the hospital, or to transfer him to the long term acute care hospital in Greensboro, NC. Unfortunately, this facility has not yet managed to work out the details with Blue Cross, and Clarence again has pneumonia. I haven't been able to see him all week, with a huge load of inspections to do in the Richmond, Virginia, area. Tonight I'll finally manage to get back to the hospital to see what's going on for myself. But the tone of voice I'm hearing from the nurses and the pulmonologist doesn't sound good.

Time to finish this up and hit the road, or I won't make it to the hospital tonight after all.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

Missing in action

I think this has to be the longest period I've ever gone without posting to the blog. The last few months have been a frantic blur, with blogging being near the bottom of the list of priorities. Clarence has been in the hospital since the first week of October, and in the ICU for the last two weeks, so I've been shuttling back and forth between the hospital, home and whatever area I needed to be working in on a given day. Since the hospital is two hours from home, there's been a lot of shuttling.

This is one of those prime examples of why one doesn't want to go into the hospital unless one is already near death. Clarence had a reaction to Lipitor, a cholesterol medication he'd been taking for years. I took him to the emergency room at the hospital where his regular doctor practices, roughly 50 miles from home. The hospital kept him for a couple of days, and then suggested he go into a nursing home for a period of rehab. The only nursing home anyone could find that would work with Clarence's government Blue Cross was another 25 miles from home, but Clarence seemed to like it there, and I was on the road, away from home, most of the time anyway. After a couple of weeks, Clarence had regained nearly all the mobility and hand function he had lost. Unfortunately, he also began retaining fluid. I didn't notice this because I was seeing him for only an hour or so at a time every couple of days. The day before he was scheduled to be discharged, the nursing home called me to say he was having difficulty breathing, and they wanted to take him to the local ER. Turned out he had congestive heart failure from 22 pounds of retained fluid. He was also coughing from the influenza he caught in the nursing home. The flu turned into pneumonia, and then he really began to having difficulty breathing. He's been on a ventilator for over two weeks now. The hospital did a tracheostomy yesterday, so he doesn't have to be intubated any more, but the long-term prognosis for breathing on his own isn't good.

He'll have to go into a nursing home, say the doctors. Clarence has a good pension, but it's not $5000 a month, the cost for a typical nursing home. No problem, they say--Medicaid will pay the difference. Of course, whatever assets he has would have to be used up first. Since I live on his only significant asset--29 acres of farmland--the nursing home proposition is a non-starter. This is not selfishness on my part. He's made it clear in conversations we've had on the subject that he did not want to be "dumped," as he put it, in a nursing home. I've promised him that I'll do whatever has to be done to care for him at home, even if that means coming up somehow with a ventilator for him. I wouldn't be able to continue working, but Shelley and Nick are willing to take over the inspections for the time being. So at this point, everything is up in the air, and I'm putting five hundred miles a week on the car just driving back and forth between home and the hospital. Sorry, but blogging is still at the bottom of the list of priorities.

Friday, September 11, 2009

Using coupons to increase your food storage

You hear about people going into a grocery store with a fistful of coupons and $10.00, and coming out with two carts full of food. They are not exaggerations. I can’t do it—I don’t have the patience to spend hours poring through internet sites and cutting out newspaper coupons. But my daughter does. I’ve seen her walk out of a store with $200 worth of food and household products, and no more then $15.00 or $20.00 out of pocket. She brags that companies pay her to carry their products home with her. It takes a lot of work to be that good at it, and I never will be. But when she lets me know about some particularly good deal, I do take advantage of it.

The information is easily available to anyone who wants to utilize the power of coupons. The internet site coupons.com is one place to start. Their coupons are recognized and accepted everywhere. SmartSource is another respected online site. From there you can link to other sites that have printable coupons, and learn how to combine manufacturers’ and store coupons, and store special offers, to enhance your food stash without spending much money.

I don’t buy much supermarket food. Most of ours comes from produce stands and farmers’ markets, and from a local farmer who provides our meat, eggs and milk. But I do buy medical supplies, some other non-food items, baby wipes and some non-perishable foods.

This picture shows part of what I brought home from a two day circuit I made of stores in a regional supermarket chain. I didn’t make any special trips—I was driving into those neighborhoods anyway to do inspections. I just detoured a block or two at the most to stop at these stores instead of heading straight back to the interstate.

Here are eight boxes of aluminum foil, three 32-ounce bottles of hydrogen peroxide, nine packages of baby wipes, five boxes of pasta and five packs of sterile rolled gauze. There were actually another three cans of canned food that I left out of the box because they didn’t show up that well in the picture.


My total expenditure? Three cents! It would have been zero, but I had purchased one $1.62 item by itself with a $1.50 coupon, and paid twelve cents plus a penny sales tax. All the other purchases came to less than zero with the coupons. The registers are supposed to show a zero balance if your total would be less than zero. In other words, they aren’t going to give you money. The final store I shopped at apparently had outdated register software, as it did show a negative ten cent balance. The cashier called the manager, since the register wouldn’t let him total out the sale with a negative balance. I protested that I wasn’t asking for money back—I’d be happy with a zero balance. “Can’t do that,” said the manager. She inserted her key, took a dime out of the register, handed it to me with a smile, and totaled out the sale at zero. So my bottom line for all these items was a whopping three cents.

I haven’t added up the receipts to show what I would have paid for these things without the coupons, but a rough estimate in my head is approximately $40.

This is a fairly extreme example. I’ve seldom done this well. But every little bit helps. The hydrogen peroxide and rolled gauze bandaging will go into the medical supplies chest, and I won’t have to buy baby wipes for a long time. The other items are things I wouldn’t have bought in those quantities if I’d had to actually pay for them. But hey, if you want to give it to me, I’ll be happy to find a place to store it!

Labels: coupons

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Mail carriers are my heroes

I can't remember when I've been so overwhelmed with work, but I did have to pause long enough to put in a good word for the postal system. I used to bitch about not being able to find some stores out in the country, where the only address I get is something like "Rt. 606." But most of Virginia's counties now have full 911 addresses, and while the mapping software hasn't completely caught up, the situation is far better than it was ten or twelve years ago.

Houses are another story altogether. Not only are many new subdivision streets not yet in the mapping databases, but in a couple of counties, the data that is there is wrong. Franklin County, Virginia, is especially bad. So I've learned not to assume that a street address is really where the map says it is. Worse yet, in some cases, all the available mapping software says the address doesn't even exist. Here is where small rural post offices really shine.

Me: Hello, I'm supposed to do an inspection at 400 Alexander Road, and I can't seem to find it on any of the maps I have.

PO clerk: Honey, you're in luck, the carrier for that route is right here. TOMMY! COME HELP THIS LADY FIND A HOUSE!

Me: repeat of above

Tommy: Oh sure, you know where the cable head-end is on Rt. 16? No? It's right past the Fast Stop. Okay, you turn left there, that's Wilson Rd., and go up 6 miles to Nickerson Lane. Turn left and go another 1/2 mile and you'll see Alexander Road on the right. The house you're looking for is the only one on the street.

Wow. He not only gave me precise directions to the street, he even knew exactly which house I was asking about. I'll think twice before I ever malign the US Postal Service again.

And I'm off down the road to inspect more houses, with no good idea of when I'll be home again, sigh.

Sunday, July 26, 2009

Why talk about the flu?

Many reasons, but here is a good explication of them, from the Avian Flu Diary blog:

The template is set to display 10 posts. To see all the posts for this month, click on the month name in the Archive section