Tag Archives: winter weather

Winter. I Almost Missed it…

10 Feb

… because I overslept.

Tuesday and Wednesday were warm enough, even overnight, that we were able to move the papyrus plant outside and leave it.  We really have to baby it all winter, because it must be kept above 55-F, but the past few weeks we’ve been putting it in the sunroom during the day, until this week when we were able to sit it out in the sun.

Wednesday night the temperature hurled itself downward, and it was barely 30º when we went to bed. I got up around 4AM and it was raining hard.  When I finally crawled out from under the covers for the day it was snowing and blowing. We got a monumental quarter inch of snow, which melted  almost before it hit the ground. By 10AM is was all gone. We had some ferocious winds – gusts up to 45 miles per hour. Anything not nailed down could be found in the next county.

Today it only reached 34° and was still breezy, but tomorrow and Sunday promise to be pushing 60 again.

Don’t like the weather? Stick around.

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Carbon Dating

27 Aug

According to the weatherman, this is supposed to be a particularly bad winter, so I decided to donate all of the canned goods I bought last fall and replace them with fresh. I don’t really like canned food, other than tomatoes, but if the power goes out, we can still heat it on the gas stove, without worrying about opening and closing the freezer.

Apparently, we had managed to consume most of what has been purchased last year – or maybe I didn’t get as much as I thought. Anyway, the entire adventure was akin to cleaning out under the kitchen sink.  Other than a few cans of tuna fish, almost everything in the pantry and the back room was wildly outdated. I mean, none of the cans were bulging, and I don’t mind trying (but would not donate) something that is, say, six months past its “use by” date, but I found things that had expired in 2009! Do you know how long ago that was?

And what on earth had I intended to fix with this assortment of goodies? Odd stuff – garbanzo beans, cheddar cheese soup, beef bullion? (we’re vegetarians, for Pete’s sake!), several cans of coconut milk (The Squire was on an Indian food kick there for a while.) and Heaven knows what all else.

We opened all the cans and dumped the stuff into the blancher, which The Squire carried out to the compost heap. He reported this evening that almost all of the food had been eaten by the critters, so at least it didn’t go completely to waste.

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