First, for my mother:
Look, Ma! I have a dryer!
In actual fact, I have had this dryer for some time now. I purchased it a month ago. It was delivered a bit over a week after I bought it. A. was very prompt in setting it up that very day, hooking up the vent and all. Which is when he discovered that the three-prong plug on the dryer was not the same as the three-prong outlet on our wall.
Sigh.
We had some kind of older style of 220-volt three-prong outlet. So he sent me the link to order the proper cord, we waited some more for that to be delivered, and he put it on yesterday.
And then I washed a load of laundry at 4:15 p.m. which was dry before I went to bed. The miracles of the modern age, indeed.
It's too bad I didn't have a (functional) dryer during our last spell of cold weather, during which I was literally hanging up laundry when it was 14 degrees outside. We did, however, have the good old woodstove. And I did figure out how to cook on it.
Some of you might remember the great pleasure I got out of cooking on our woodstove at Blackrock. The woodstove there was literally just a giant cast-iron box, which was perfect for cooking on. The whole thing was like a stove burner. Every part of it was blazing hot at all times. Good for pumping out heat and cooking on. Not so good for keeping small children from branding themselves accidentally.
The woodstove in this house has a kind of metal grate enclosing the entirety of the firebox. Much better for non-branded children, but not so good for cooking on. The surface of this grate is not hot enough to simmer a pot of water. Or food.
However! I no longer have tiny children! They can all understand the concept of keeping their bodies away from hot surfaces! And that meant I could lift the top of the safety grate thing to access the firebox itself.
Which is what I did to cook this pot of pinto beans.
Which then went into this chili.
I also kept a covered saucepan of water on there to stay hot, which was handy because our constantly-used electric kettle died right in the middle of this cold snap. We do have a microwave to heat water for tea or A.'s instant coffee, but the children were home for a couple of days doing their schooling online, and when our microwave is running for more than a minute, it messes with the Wi-Fi in most of the house and makes their Zoom meetings drop.
Not on Zoom, but still using the Wi-Fi to do an online learning program for school.
So when A. went into the kitchen to get more coffee or tea, which is a frequent occurrence on very cold days, he could just use the already-hot water on the stove and microwave it for about thirty seconds to get it to a true boil.
I also kept an uncovered pan of water on the stove to evaporate and put some much-needed moisture into the very dry air. And, as you can see, to thaw some frozen lamb stock for the coming chili.
I did order another kettle, which arrived a couple of days ago. The one we had was no longer available, so I got one that looked pretty much the same. Unfortunately, it doesn't heat quite as quickly, and also the button is on the handle at the top, rather than a small lever at the bottom. This makes it harder to find in the dark kitchen, which is where I hit the switch before I start getting dressed.
Still boils the water, though. And makes that trippy blue light.
Also related to the stretch of very wintery weather was the lamb carcass. A. slaughtered the last ram lamb some time ago and hung it in the tree out front to age. We were planning on butchering it on the really bad weather day when we would be inside anyway. But when he took it down from the tree in the morning, it was frozen solid. So we had to leave it inside to thaw. Our non-carpeted and relatively warm spots for this were pretty limited, so we put on the floor of the dining room.
I spy with my little eye . . .
Amusingly, every one of the children woke up, came into the dining room, and said not one word about the lamb carcass on the floor. Too accustomed to such things to comment on it, I suppose.
We never got to it that day, though, so we moved it into A.'s office until we could get to it. That room isn't really heated much above freezing, and the lamb had been frozen for the better part of its aging, so we figured it could use some more time to age properly. It did this on top of my washing machine, which is also in A.'s office.
And then I needed to actually use the washing machine, so we moved the carcass again. This time on top of the dog crates that were also in A.'s office. It seemed pretty mean that the dogs were sleeping in these crates literally right under all that delicious meat, but it would also have been mean to leave them outside when it was zero degrees. So they did indeed sleep under the lamb for several nights until we finally got around to cutting it up.
There you have it! My (winter) life, snapshotted.
