It’s 53 freaking degrees in this house right now.  Sure it could be icy and yucky and we could have 17 feet of snow, but still.  I had the thermostat set at 65, and the best the boiler could do was 53. 

The cold is bad, but it’s the wind that’s killing me.  There’s a wind advisory, and we’ve already had gusts of 55 mph.  The walk in garage door has already been entirely blown off the garage, not just off its hinges.  In fact, the hinges and the door frame they were attached to are also sitting in the yard.  I’m not surprised, I’m just thrilled nothing hit the car. 

It’s so windy that the warm gets sucked right out of the house.  The constant window rattling is starting to get on my nerves a little too.  We did more winterizing this year than last, but I think we could stand to do quite a bit more.

I’ve cranked up the thermostat to 80, we’ll see if that can make the temperature in here break 60.  In the meantime, I’ve set up the portable hearter, but I can just about see the money flying out the window when I run it for very long.  I’ve got on wool socks and a wool sweater, to the heck with allergies.  At this point, if I could find woolen dainties, I’d give them a try too.  I think it’s time to run the oven self cleaner.  That ought to heat things up too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to be here.  I know things could be a lot worse.  Still.  5 months to April.

We learned a lot last winter.  Things like:  There is no LP fairy that comes to refill the tank when it runs low.  It’s really a guy named Tom, and it’s a good idea to call him before the tank runs dry.  Otherwise, you’ll feel pretty stupid for complaining about how the pilot light in the boiler doesn’t work right.  Again.

We also learned that just because we had two houses twenty miles apart, there was no guarantee we’d have power at either.  Two days after we got an offer on the old house, there was a huge ice storm.  At the old house a large branch fell across the power lines, ripping them and quite a bit of siding off the house.  At this house, the power was on and off for days as crews worked to repair miles of lines.

Another fun fact: No power equals no heat and no oven.  I was under the very mistaken impression that if you have a gas boiler and a gas stove that it doesn’t matter if you don’t have power, you’ll still have heat and the ability to cook.  I now have a greater understanding of the phrase “electronic ignition”.

We learned that if you only have a cell phone for communication, and it only works because you have a booster thingy hooked up to the computer, it’s not going to work when the power is out.  And that makes it especially difficult to call the power company to ask them to pretty please come fix the lines.

I also learned that no power equals no water.  It turns out our well has an electric pump, which means not just no hot water, but no water period.  As in “Whatever you do, don’t flush!!”

Still, it was pretty:

Every blade of grass was covered with ice.

As was every branch of every tree.

On a small scale it was very pretty.

But that much ice can cause a lot of damage.

Everything had a coat of ice.  Everything.

I had lots of fun with the camera, but I was oh-so-happy when all the ice was gone, and the roads were mostly clear.  It turns out that cabin fever sets in a whole lot faster than you expect when there’s no power, no heat, no water, no phone, no tv, no computer,  and the biggest back-to-the-little-house-on-the-prairie horror, no internet.

One of the big selling points of this house was that we’d have room for a dog.  A big dog.  A really big dog.  So after we moved, and got settled in, and the kids started school, I finally got moving on finding one.

I spent a lot of time over the summer browsing.  I knew we wanted a large used dog with low mileage.  Over and over I kept coming back to one dog on Petfinder.  He was an hour and half away, which didn’t seem like too far, and it sounded like the lady that had him knew him well.  Unfortunately, when I called, she said the dog had disappeared ‘last week’.

I was very disappointed, but started the search over.  Then I noticed a dog listed at the shelter near where my first pick had gone missing.  Although it was the same mix, I didn’t think it was the same dog as the picture was blurry, and the listing was for a female.  I decided to go look anyway, hoping it would be similar in temperment to what we wanted.

Once I saw Buster, I knew without a doubt this was the dog from the first listing.  He has a very distinctive face, and up close it was very clear I’d found my first pick.  It was lucky that I happened to go that weekend.  It turned out he had been at the shelter for almost 2 months, and was due to wear out his welcome in just a few days.

Part Australian Shepherd, part Labrador, wired completely incorrectly.  He’s a great dog, but something clearly doesn’t work quite right in his brain.  Not in a ‘he’s going to snap and eat the children’ kind of way.  More in a ‘he has no taste in people whatsoever’ way.  My father, who visits fairly often since he has equipment stored here, is treated very warily.  He always has a treat for Buster, but if I’m not there, Buster won’t have any part of it.  On the other hand, Buster would have gone home with the creepy insurance sales guy.  For some reason, he just seemed like a lot of fun.

The kids love him, and he’s turned out to be a very good dog.  Puppies are awfully cute, and I won’t deny that I would have like one.  But now I can’t imagine getting anything but a shelter dog.

When the window air conditioner came out of the computer room, and before the storm windows went in for the winter, I had a fabulous idea.  I’d keep a sack of dog treats just inside the window, and when I saw Buster wandering around in the yard, I’d call him over and give him a little treat.  He’d hang out by the window while I was working on the computer, and we’d keep each other company.

Unfortunately, he’s far smarter than I gave him credit for.  He now checks the window several times a day to see if I’m sitting at the computer.  He barks at the cat sitting inside where it’s warm.  He barks at me to give him a treat or let him on to the porch or because it’s Tuesday and he just feels like barking.  A lot.

I realized yesterday that ALL of our downstairs windows have nose smears.  Apparently he’s been going window to window checking to see what those pesky cats are doing.

I wonder how long it’s going to take to untrain him.  Or me.  Or both of us.

This was the view from the front yard Sunday morning.  Since July, the corn has been way over our heads, giving us a 9-foot-high 200-yard-thick privacy fence.

By midday, the field was started.

And by the evening, things looked a lot different.

It’s amazing how strange it seems now.  I know no one is actually spying on us as we are, in fact, completely boring.  But I feel like we’re exposed now that there’s no corn to hide behind.

The auger wagon usually follows the combine, and ferries the grain from it back to the trucks parked on the road.  Then the trucks take it in to the grain elevator in town.  However, a small portion of the grain from this field goes into the bins here.

There’s still a lot of harvesting to finish though.  Cool weather and a lot of rain kept the farmers out of the fields much longer than usual.

What’s holding up your kitchen floor?  Steel beams?  A slab?  The kitchen ceiling of the apartment downstairs?  Plain old 2×4s?  How lucky you are.  When we first started talking about moving to this house, my younger brother mentioned the logs in the basement.  I assumed he was confused, and completely blew him off.

Then my older brother mentioned that the teenager that worked for him this summer called the basement ‘A horror movie waiting to happen.’  I really hoped he was confused, but I was starting to get nervous.

The basement is scary.  I knew that.  When I was little, my older brother told me NOT to go down there.  Since he had never shown any particular concern for my health before, and in fact was known to torture me when any opportunity presented itself, I decided to take him seriously.  So, I never went downstairs while my grandparents lived here.  However, I finally braved the truly frightening basement stairs today to look at the underside of our kitchen floor.  It’s a little difficult to believe:

That’s one of the, to the best of anyone’s knowledge, 170 year old logs holding up my kitchen floor.  And yes, that’s the 170 year old bark still on it.

I started doing the math today.  The old part of this house was built sometime between 1829 and 1835.  The oldest building in the county is a log cabin built in 1829, and it was originally located just a mile or so from this house.  I knew that part of this house was from the same time frame, I just somehow always managed to skip over the ‘log cabin’ part. 

For reference, Laura Ingells Wilder of ‘Little House on the Prairie’ was born in 1867.  That’s 30+ years AFTER this house was built.

Oh. My.

Ignore the cobwebs, they’re not the scary part.

School has started.  The house seemed absolutely empty this afternoon.  And quiet.  I was completely confused by the quiet.  Thing Two generally starts narrating when she wakes up in the morning, “Now Mommy’s fixing my cereal.  Mommy!  Do you remember when you were fixing my cereal?  Now Mommy’s putting my cereal on the table.  Mommy!  Do you remember getting my cereal for me, and then putting it on the table?”  I sometimes feel like I’m stuck in some sort of documentary.

We went to a school open house on Monday.  I was absolutely astounding by the number of people I knew.  Why this should suprise me, I don’t know.  It’s not like I moved 4000 miles away and then found out that more than 1/4 of Thing One’s class are children of people I went to school with. 

Thing One started yesterday.  He was a little worried about the new school, but he seems to be settling in fine.  I’ve been a little stressed about being at the end of the lane in time to meet the bus.  Poor kid ends up running because I’m afraid I hear it coming down the road.  Then it ends up being a bicycle or something else that really shouldn’t be confused with a bus.

Thing Two started today.  I can’t believe she’s in Kindergarten.  It actually feels like she should be in junior high.  I asked her if she was scared about starting school.  She thought for a minute and said, “More apprehensive than scared Mommy.”  Jeesh.  I think apprehensive was a college vocab word for me.

I don’t think she’ll ever look back.

The view from our front porch is of this little church.  It’s a bit embarrassing to admit that I’m not sure if it’s still a church.  I have no earthly idea what denomination it is (or was) or if the congregation ever even reached double digits. 

What I DO know is that it used to be a one room schoolhouse.  My grandmother taught there for 9 years, retiring just before my father was born.  My father attended kindergarten and first grade there, before school consolidation, and the advent of the bus ride to town.  My mother went to a one room school quite a few miles away, but in the same consolidation she went to town school as well. 

I realized just last week that Grandma didn’t live at this house when she taught there, she and Grandpa lived a mile or so further up the road.  I bet it was an unbelievable pain in the middle of winter to get to school.  I’m sure the roads wouldn’t have been cleared, although I tend to doubt she drove to school anyway.  Then to get there and have to start the heater and wait in the bitter cold for the place to heat up.  Yikes.

Tomorrow night I’m having a meteor shower party.  The height of activity is supposed to be around 1:30 am or so, and I doubt very very much if any of us make it that long.  It’s also supposed to be cloudy.  If it’s not cloudy, the moon may be too bright.  Apart from that, we ought to have a lovely, successful viewing.

I thought I’d go out tonight and play with camera settings.  I’ve seen some really awesome pictures from previous years, and thought it would be fun to try it out.  As soon as I stepped out on the porch, I saw a meteor shoot by.  It was unfortunately the only one I saw, and of course I didn’t get any shots of it.  Still, how cool is that?

I don’t have a cable release for the camera, and I was trying to be so careful not to jiggle the camera too much.  I did eventually realize that I was actually holding my breath and tiptoeing.  Apparently it’s important to sneak up on the camera in order to minimize movement.