Bonus

It sure is handy to live in the perpetually frozen north when it's time to defrost the freezer. Just load all the freezer stuff up into bags and throw it out the door.

No worries about thawing here.

Still keeping on the sunny side. Or on the frozen, winter-y side, as it were.

My Good Deed for the Decade

We had an incident of the woodchuck variety last weekend wherein A. got the minivan stuck on ice and I had to ride to the rescue with the Awesome Subaru to pull the van up the icy incline. This required A. to search through the back of the Subaru to find rope and a knife to cut the rope.

This is how I became aware of the absolutely appalling state of the Subaru. Empty beer bottles and cans galore, traps, bits of rusty wire tangled up in everything, jumper cables twining all over the place, a logging chain . . . it was horrendous*.

The flotsam did yield the required rope and knife, and we did get the minivan off the ice. But the mess in the back of the Subaru continued to haunt me.

So today, when Jack and I were outside for a little airing*, I decided I would at least get the beer bottles and cans out of there. So I did. Then I put all the loose traps and pieces of wire in a bucket, untangled and coiled up the rope, put the logging chain in a box, stowed away the jumper cables, sorted through various bits of trash and empty bags . . . 

And then I found it. In an innocuous-looking, opaque plastic bag, which seemed kind of heavy and when I peeked in to see what was in there . . .

OH MY GOD, SO GROSS.

It was a deer heart. Yes, the heart of a deer.

A. had saved it for trapping bait when he shot a deer. He shot the deer two months ago. That deer heart has been sitting in the back of his car for TWO MONTHS. Of course, it was frozen much of the time. But still. That is so, so wrong.

Because I have been married to A. for almost 14 years now, I wasn't all that surprised to find such a thing in his car. And it didn't occur to me to throw away the ancient deer heart. Instead I left it in his car and mentioned it to him when he was about to go check a trap. He was very pleased that I had discovered some bait that he had forgotten about, as he's almost out.

I'm glad he's so pleased with his tainted deer heart. But I don't think I'll be clearing out his car for him any time soon.

* It was 35 degrees and blowing wet snow, so it wasn't so much an airing as an endurance, I suppose. Jack seemed happy enough to be out, though.

In a Nutshell

So how did today's snow/ice day off from school go with me home with all three kids and A. gone?

Well, at one point, there were about five of these signs around the house:

I give points for the proper use of an exclamation point, though the spelling is abysmal. It does get the point across, however.

That particular sign was retaliation for the fact that I wouldn't give Cubby a second bowl of yogurt. OH, THE INJUSTICE.

Cubby later marched around the living room holding a similar sign aloft and chanting, "Go away, go away, go away."

Freedom of assembly comes in many forms*. 

There were various other unpleasant parts to the day, culminating in Cubby putting himself down on the couch with a blanket at 5:30 p.m. while Charlie squirmed around my feet complaining of a stomach ache and Jack threw things at him. 

So I put the whole unhappy crew to bed at 6:20 p.m. Oh yes, I did. And I haven't heard a sound from them since.

Tomorrow is a new day, full of fresh promise. And school. Alleluia.

* I couldn't help but think, with some amusement, that he was basically doing what pretty much all those protesters on Saturday were doing. They should have just used his chant. There's something to be said for a simple message like that.

Ice Day

This morning at 5:43, the phone rang with the announcement that school is closed today due to weather. Our forecast was calling for 5-8 inches of snow, all falling during school hours, so I was anticipating this.

I thought how excited Cubby and Charlie would be to not only get to stay home from school, but play out in the snow, too.

Then I went outside to let Mia out and almost went ass over teakettle on the quarter inch of solid ice coating the porch.

Not so much a snow day as an ice day, then. Super.

Mom Life

At 7:45 this morning, I had been up for two hours, had two cups of coffee, and was feeling as if some breakfast might be advisable. I also felt that I might as well go all out and make bacon along with the inevitable egg. You know, in celebration of a lazy Saturday morning.

Except "children" and "lazy mornings" don't really go together, and I do have three of those children things.

Said children had already eaten some oatmeal, but I charitably offered to make bacon and eggs for them, too. When I asked who wanted some before I started cooking, Jack said he wanted bacon, Charlie said he didn't want anything, and Cubby said no, thanks, he had to go poop.

Okay. The "no, thanks" would have been enough for me.

So I started cooking four pieces of bacon. One for Jack, one for me, two for A. whenever he got up.

When the bacon was done, I gave Jack his piece and made myself an egg. Charlie wandered into the kitchen requesting bacon. I gave him a piece.

When my egg was done, I sat down at the table with my plate of egg and bacon. I had taken one bite of egg before Jack made it clear that actually, he wanted an egg too.

So I put another egg in the pan and gave him the one I had started eating, since it was already cooling down.

My egg in the pan was almost done when Charlie came back into the kitchen requesting more bacon. Nope, I said. If you're still hungry, you can have an egg. Okay, said Charlie.

So I gave him my egg. And put another in the pan for me.

Cubby came out of the bathroom and, anticipating further requests for food, I yelled down to him that if he wanted to eat, he'd better come up and eat now because I was almost done cooking. Okay, said Cubby. I GUESS I can eat something.

So he got a piece of bacon and the egg from the pan.

Notice I didn't say my egg from the pan. It was pretty clear at this point that as long as the locusts were in the kitchen, nothing in that pan was going to be mine.

Jack finished his egg and asked for another. So I made him another. He got through about one bite of that before throwing his fork and starting to spit out bites of egg, in addition to whining and generally exhibiting classic I Need a Nap behavior.

I decided it would be best to wait until that nap before I attempted my own breakfast again.

It only took me one hour, four eggs, three pieces of bacon, three cups of milk, and one chapter from the Narnia book (read to keep Cubby and Charlie from shrieking and keeping Jack from falling asleep), but I FINALLY had my breakfast. And because A. had awakened, I used the sole remaining piece of bacon, plus some cheese and leftover vegetables, to make an omelet for the two of us.

So in the end, my breakfast ended up being better than I had originally planned.

The best things in life are worth waiting for, right? Right.

Acclimated

We keep our thermostat set at 64 degrees during the day in the winter. But this house is so well-insulated and open that when I cook a lot, the heat from the kitchen increases the overall temperature of the house significantly. Also, there are a lot of west-facing windows in the upstairs living room, so when it's sunny, there's quite a bit of solar heating, too.

This morning I had the oven at 415 degrees for about an hour to bake bread and roast squash. At the same time, I was simmering both chili and pizza sauce. Then the sun came out.

It is now 71 degrees in my house. Seventy-one degrees! I had to take off my flannel shirt* and get some cold seltzer, because I was feeling very overheated.

Obviously, I live in the right place.

* Don't worry: I had a long-sleeved t-shirt underneath. I'm not going to become a semi-nudist or anything.

Neither Rain Nor Snow

There's a kind of running joke in my family about how my mom walked me to the bus stop for only the first year we lived in Alaska, and thereafter granted me full independence for bus stop journeys. I was nine years old at the time and the bus stop was about a quarter mile away. I'm sure my independence was mostly granted because of the way below zero temperatures and total darkness.

I do not recall being particularly upset by this, but I find it amusing as an adult to tease my mom about her abandonment.

Then Cubby started taking the bus here. After a week or so of taking him to the end of the driveway--all of about 100 yards from the house--to get on the bus, and being out to meet the bus when he got home, I was all, "Yeah, you just go on out there on your own, Cubby. I trust you."

I am my mother.

But I really do trust Cubby. I trust him to wait by the side of the road, to cross the road when he's given the appropriate signal by the bus driver, and to come right into the house in the afternoon.

Charlie, however, I do not trust. And not just because he's only four, either. Cubby probably would have behaved exactly the same two years ago as he does today. But Charlie is not quite so rule-abiding and never has been. I would not put it past him to get mad at Cubby and go racing off down the road, or into the woods, or . . . well, I just don't trust him.

So now we all go out in the morning to wait for the bus, and Jack and I are always outside to meet the bus in the afternoon, regardless of the weather.

This is no small thing in this climate. One morning last week our entire driveway was a sheet of ice covered in a layer of rain, which resulted in a Three Stooges On Ice situation with children prat falling all over and the dog getting in everyone's way. It was hilarious, if irritating.

We've been out in the rain, and the sleet, and the snow, and almost total darkness. Today just as the bus arrived to drop Cubby and Charlie off, I noticed it seemed to get suddenly darker. I looked to the west to see a wall of fog blowing at us. It was cool to watch, but probably not so cool to the bus driver, who had to drive right into it.

I may not enjoy having to be out in all weathers for bus stop duty, but at least I don't have to drive the actual bus in those conditions. And for that, I am extremely grateful.