Rainy Day Musings

The raw wood where we ripped up the saturated
laminate after the burst pipes. And yet, there are
worse things to happen. :)

The thaw continues! Today it's 48 degrees and raining, and I got to be home for the majority of it! I've gone ahead and opened my windows for the first time in tooooo loooong and the sound of the rain in the woods is truly the most beautiful music. Finally there's not even a snowy cap on the trailer roof; I can hear the raindrops above me again! 

Spring is coming. I can feel it, and hear it, and smell it, and I've never been this excited about April before. I guess I'm just eager for all the winter complications to be over - heating costs, broken pipes, no water, the bedroom being too cold to sleep in, etc. - and to enjoy the warmer weather's (hopefully) easier time of it. Hospitality should be easier, too - it's kinda hard to invite many people over because more than eight proves rather snug, but when the weather is nice we can always use the great outdoors :)

Let it thaw, let it thaw, let it thaw!

Preparations

In the spirit of the thaw, and appreciation for everything this March muddiness promises, tonight I finally ordered my seeds from Baker Seed Company! They're an organic, heirloom seed company that celebrates the beauty of non-GMO vegetables, fruits, and flowers. This will be the first spring in about five years that I'll be planting a garden again, so I'm hugely excited! I ordered: rosemary, German chamomile, lavender, basil, two varieties of lettuce (one red, one green), zucchini, peas, pickling cucumbers, tomatoes and black cherry tomatoes, string beans, Mexican sour gherkins, bachelor's buttons, kiss-me-over-the-garden-gates (besides the fact that they're gorgeous, I think the name will be good conversation starter material!), and in celebration of this little house... Canterbury Bells!


Thinking ahead to spring cleaning also has me excited... the thought of airing out the house and scrubbing it all down from top to bottom is delightful. Plus I'm a little tired of wiping up muddy boot-prints! I found a bunch of recipes for all-purpose, all-natural cleaning sprays, and decided to make some of my own! Conveniently, several of us around here are currently smoothie / juice fasting, so orange and clementine peels are pretty abundant. It's a useful and easy way to avoid waste!

March Fidgets: The Beginning of the Big Thaw

Those January squirms were nothing compared to what we went through during February...  we had SO. MANY. BLIZZARDS. All one after another, sometimes twice in a week, and in-between little snowstorms that would fill in every inch just in case a bit decided to melt off the top somehow. We had about four feet on the ground for a good long while, I'd say, with blizzards measuring more but never getting the change to settle and melt to less.

After only the very first blizzard... we thought we had a lot then! 

I wasn't able to spend much time in my little house for about three weeks. It cost so much just keeping it above freezing with electric room heaters for my poor piano, nevermind trying to keep the propane running at any decent temperatures. Lots of the nights were in the negative degrees and I spent most of them on my parents' couch. Twice a week - on Tuesday nights and Fridays - I would kick the snow off the steps and light up the propane so I could teach lessons with the families keeping in relative comfort. (Relative comfort usually being about 63 - 65 degrees.

Hauling water makes me appreciate generous
 neighbors, at least! ;)

Of course, my water pipes froze, and so we turned off the water from the spigots. About a week ago after we finally had about four consecutive days above freezing, my dad figured it was warm enough that the drainpipes had thawed. He melted the icy long hose to the spigot, then turned the water back on. Voila! Running water again! I got home late that night, brushed my teeth in my own sink instead of in the snow, and went to bed. The next morning I woke up to an icy lake across the bathroom floor, with puddles seeping through to the bedroom and hallway, under the floorboards and into every crack through the walls. (Not the cheeriest wakeup.) I sopped up the enormous mess, turned the spigot back off, and trudged off to meet my ride to work. Later that night my dad inspected the damage - apparently a pipe inside the shower had burst in the night. Ultimate repairs remain to be determined, but for now it's back to hauling water. March has brought temperatures up into the forties, and so a lot of the snow is finally melting.