We had our first taste of bitter winter weather last week. We were in the single digits several times with wind chills below zero. It felt more like February than November. It could have been worse. Buffalo and points just west and north of us got their first lake effect snow – seven feet of it! I’m thankful that I don’t live in the lake effect zone. We just had light flurries here and that was enough for me.
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| Cold November morning. |
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| Our mornings of late - the back porch thermometer. |
During the coldest days and nights last week our furnace decided to go on the fritz. Our furnace is an old gas floor furnace. The grate is in the floor at the point where the living room, dining room, and music room meet. It does a good job of heating those three rooms and some of the heat manages to make its way into the kitchen, our bedroom downstairs, and, through a vent in the living room ceiling, into the big room upstairs. We keep the furnace thermostat set low at 58° and try to use the wood stove most of the time. The furnace comes on mostly at night when the wood stove has gone cold. For two days the furnace pilot would not stay lit. Stacey, Josiah, and Daniel worked on it and got it to light again, at least for now. I think the thermal coupler is on its way out. It was not fun waking up in a very cold house while it wasn’t working. We’ll have to keep a spare thermal coupler on hand to avoid further shivering.
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| The floor furnace. |
Our skunk ordeal continued last week. After the second skunk was dispatched down in the barn, we thought we were rid of them, but we were wrong. New lawn damage appeared the next day. The culprit dug through the snow to get to the lawn. Daniel went on alert again and on Monday night he shot yet another skunk in the front yard right by the house under the bird feeders. It was a big one and it sprayed when it was shot. The stench is still lingering six days later. That makes three skunks in two weeks. Until now we haven’t seen so many skunks in so short a time and they’ve never caused damaged like this last lot did. We haven’t seen any evidence of any since then. We’re hoping our ordeal is finally over.
With cold, snowy weather, we gave in and started listening to Christmas music already. We usually try to wait until after Thanksgiving. I love Christmas music in all of its varieties, the sacred, the silly, the Classical, the pop. We have a large collection of Christmas albums. Among our favorites are The Judds, A Charlie Brown Christmas, the Winter Solstice albums I-V, and all the Celtic Christmas albums. Of course our top rated favorites are the Mormon Tabernacle Choir albums. We also listen to the Pandora Christmas channels. There are a few Christmas songs that I get tired of hearing very quickly, "Baby It’s Cold Outside" and "Santa Baby" are at the top of that list. The day after Thanksgiving we will turn on our outdoor Christmas lights. That’s when we will start watching Christmas movies too. Julie has informed us that she has been recording Hallmark Christmas movies for us to watch. Ugh. The women folk enjoy them, but I find them sappy and predictable. I watch them anyway. I prefer the classic Christmas movies, White Christmas, The Bishop’s Wife, It’s A Wonderful Life, Christmas In Connecticut, etc.
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| The frozen orchard. |
We will celebrate Thanksgiving this week and it will be a low key affair, just us and the Shilligs, no company. We are not providing the turkey this year. We only have two hens available to eat and they aren’t big enough. We are in charge of pies and cranberry sauce and zesty carrots. I love Thanksgiving. I just finished reading Saints and Strangers, an account of the those first settlers of Massachusetts, and I can better appreciate how much they sacrificed in coming to an unknown land. Their first years in America were plagued with sickness, starvation, and danger. We owe them so much for doing what they did. The nation they founded has forgotten to large extent what they did. We have mythologized most of it and made them into cute little pilgrims in quaint costumes eating turkey and pumpkin pies with the Indians. We use the day of Thanksgiving as an excuse to eat ourselves sick and watch football or, even worse I think, to begin the materialistic shopping frenzy that Christmas has become. I’m thankful for those brave men and women, for their vision, their endurance, their passion for freedom.
Today was our Stake Conference. We watched it at our chapel via the internet, which makes me thankful for technology. It was a good conference and I’m thankful we didn’t have to drive all the way to Palmyra to attend.
The weather is warmer today. We’re in the 50's today and tomorrow. Most of the snow is gone. It looks and smells like spring, a cruel illusion here on the front end of winter. Even so, I’ll be thankful for it while it lasts. Winter is expected to descend on us again on Tuesday and I think it will stay for a long while.
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| Yesterday, before the thaw. |
