Lil Bit of Baking

I am really looking forward to Christmas being over.

I am not sick of Christmas decor or music, not stressed out by the gifts (much) but I can feel SAD creeping in. Unlike last year, I am not without electricity or warmth, and this year I have last year’s depression episode to warn me. I am seeing the crankiness and carb-loading for what it is. I will win. It doesn’t make much sense to me anyway, because I LIKE the changes in the seasons. I LIKE the dark, and I know it’s transitory. But my body, whoo boy, my body doesn’t like it. The spectrum light bulbs really do help, but they don’t fix it.

But anyway, I associate Christmas with the Solstice, and I will love it love it love it when the days begin to lengthen again.

Today my pasty white children and I baked pumpkin bread and roasted pumpkin seeds. They actually ate their healthy dinner of sauteed chicken and wild rice pilaf. I suppose having pumpkin bread considered as a vegetable side dish will help speed matters along there.

~G~ drew out an artistic design for her big blank wall in her room. I think it’s fabulous, and if we can pull it off, she’ll have a rockin accent wall. I am definitely going to support her in this endeavor.

Speaking of ~G~, massive trauma today. Her surviving crab is hanging out of his shell. I hear Monty Python as I type this, regrettably, but I do have to note he’s not dead yet. So he’s either dying or he’s molting. In the spirit of optimism, we returned him to his dark coconut shell house and shored him up with food and water. She got two crabs from Santa last year, and she has really taken very good care of them. One passed this summer,and she buried it under a rose bush. It would be most unfortunate to lose Flower so close to his birthday. She’s planned a party for him, complete with wrapped gifts tucked under the tree. She made him a stocking out of felt and and has it hanging alongside ours. I feel terrible for her, really do.

Farm Day!

And a beautiful one at that, albeit cold. I don’t want to be home, for some odd reason. I want to be gone already. Maybe I will make an early lunch, stuff them like piggies and just take off. Tuesdays are special days anyway, because the kids get to be dropped off at their classes by Mom and magically picked up again by Dad.

I am feeling very connected today to my friends, even the ones I hardly get to see. There’s a lot of transition going on right now; careers, school, pregnancy, health issues of myriad kinds. Over a month away, I already feel the solstice calm growing. I’ve never felt it this early before, so it’s …interesting.

Of course, now that I write that out, I think it could be just a shadow of last year’s solstice. Yesterday we had a storm that knocked out our power for a few hours. We had Y classes so we barely even noticed it. When we returned home we had power again, but we still screwed something up on our woodstove when we decided to have a fire anyway, and had roiling smoke billow into the living areas. Yup, pretty much exactly like last year.

Another Ice Storm

It was bad here in Washington, but it’s been much, much worse in the midwest, where they had so few trees to shelter and protect them. This reminds me of the blizzards in the 1800s where so very many died. A friend of mine in Missouri managed to get to a connection to update us.

Hi everyone, I am just checking in. We still have no power and we were told yesterday that it could be another 10 days. We also have no land line phone, and no internet. We do have a generator, so we aren’t suffering too bad. But we have to drive 20 miles for gas.

This has been bad. Very bad. Seven people have died in my little neck of the woods. Out of 4000 people, less than 100 have power here in town. Several thousand in the rural areas are still down. My folks are still out and I have spent most of my time on the farm trying to take care of stock. We can’t pump water so we have to break the ice loose from the ponds. Dad and I have lost 17 head of cattle between us, about $34,000.

We have no trees left, none. Those that are still standing have to be cut down. We have roof damage and damage to one of our cars.

This has been so surreal. The National Guard is everywhere. Houses are burning down. People are carrying guns with them, including us. Twice someone has tried to steal our generator, while it was runnning. People are stealing cattle. People are looting. It is just crazy.

We are forecasted 4-6 inches of snow tonight. Joy. I’ll post pics when I re-join civilization again.

Preparation is so important. Coming from the hurricane coast, its second nature to me; we understand that Mother Nature is a Bitch who barely tolerates us. The rest of the country is literally being taken by storm and it hurts me to see how many people are just….clueless. I want to belong to a society that knows how privileged it is. We can’t rely on the grid and the layers of commercial infrastructure to be there for our families in the face of true national emergency. Even blaming the government with incompetence or ill-judgment doesn’t cut it. It doesn’t take bad intentions on the part of a municipality for you to be completely self-reliant for quite some time. The government is neither our parent nor our babysitter. It has a role to fulfill, but ours, when it comes to caring for our own, is much more principal.

It’s so difficult to tell, for me, whether this is a cyclical event or whether it’s the beginning of the BIG cycle. We’ve had weather like this before in cycles of history, and I comfort myself with that, but those events did not coincide with giant chunks of ice falling into the sea at both poles. I am a true water baby, and I am concerned. The seas have changed. The little creatures that helped a Coastal Carolina child match the seasons have gone…. GONE: the hot autumn glow of lightning bugs, the spring cicada swarms, the deafening chirping of the summer tree frogs, the march of the hermit crabs right down the street to the other side of the neighborhood. Here in Washington, the salmon are having serious trouble. Even here.

In the large “pro” column of moving to Washington was the greater potential for sustainability in the face of cataclysm. I hope never to have to rely on our sense of self sufficiency. We did better than a lot of our neighbors, but in my mind, we are not nearly as prepared as I would like. The garage, which is untidy– not an impassable dumping ground, but somewhat chaotic at the moment– looks different to me. I want the camping and fishing gear easily accessible. Tidiness is no longer an aesthetic for me, but part of taking care of my family in a very real, protective sense. That’s a life change.

We got snow! And kept power!

How nice was THAT duality!?

My pictures of the event are underwhelming but I like the ones over on Niki’s blog!

There, and back again

Today is my first day online since December 14th. The windstorm that hit the NW hit us hard as well, and we were without power for EIGHT DAYS. That means no phone (cable modem), no cell (no way to recharge) and no heat. We have a woodstove, but we had it serviced in October and learned the catalytic converter is stuck. That’s no big deal for a casual romantic fire, but we burned it for 6 days sick and nearly put me in the hospital with bronchitis; I am now on Z-pack and another med, P-daddy is on a Z-pack and albuterol, for the first time at 40. We finally gave up and spent two days with wonderful friends, before coming home on Friday. Within half an hour, we finally had a truck come and we had power at last.

The lights returned, poetically, the day after Winter Solstice.

We were fortunate in many, many ways. No one we know,much less in our little family, was hurt. The trees downed in our neighborhood were not ours and did not fall on our property. Coming from the South, we were imminently prepared for extended outages in terms of food, cooking, and lighting. (We were not prepared for the dark, and for the smoke.) The absolute lack of communication was jarring, but so appropriate for the season. The people who love us made that clear in word and deed. It has been as ever, a season of gifts and blessing.

I am gleeful to discover I missed the internet not one whit.

Happy Holidays.

Outage antics part three

The kids getting tired, finally. They curled up with B-Goddess for a neatly translated storytime while I was packing to take us home to the cold and dark .

They finally restored our power that evening at 5.15, exactly 8 days and 45 minutes after it had gone out. The paper later read that we were in the last 500 homes restored.

Outage antics part two

Day 8– Trader Joe’s escape.

We ran into Brandywine and R-lady when we escaped to TJ’s for a bit to plan dinner. BrazilianGoddess got to hold Mr Smiley for the first time in months!

At this point P-Daddy and I were growing concerned that we would have to choose between a Christmas at home or a Christmas in a hotel.

Outage antics part one

We were without power for 8 days. I have to admit, we were very well prepared for the subsistence angle: we have city water which stayed with us for the duration, and we had a lot of alternative heating sources which we used to cook, heat water and our home.

We did not, however, anticipate the effect of the dark and cold on us. Even with the wood stove burning for 6 days straight, we never got the living room above 63 degrees F even during the day; usually it hovered around 57 F. With the light fading at 3.30 and dark falling at 4.30, there wasn’t a great deal we could see to do in one room by candlelight. Too dim to read or knit or even color, we had to entertain ourselves in other ways.

We used to own five oil lamps, but the moving company required us to leave those behind when we came across country. We’d never replaced them because they’d always been a novelty item, something we used infrequently. They did shed much better light than our little camping light!
The power took with it the phone, as we have cable telephone service, and my cell phones, as I have no car charger for my cell phone. With the grid disrupted, when my phone was charged, it still roamed a lot more than usual. P-daddy still had his, so he would call my friends, who would in turn hear from me. It was convoluted because Qwest sucks like that and my phone wasn’t ringing the whole time. But that’s another post.

The kids slept in their own rooms under heavy blankets, as did we. When P-Daddy had to leave for a busines strip, the kids all slept with me. That was the coldest night, 24 degrees outside. The stove stayed stoked for 6 days until the pine finally took it’s toll on me and I could no longer fight the bronchitis. We stayed two nights with a friend, returning home to pack to go to a hotel. As I sorted clothes, the power returned.

This series starts with pix from when the outage was still fun.

Day three: Storm’s Aftermath

Trees on Danforth. As bad as they looked, they didn’t really impact the power situation.

Cuddling after baths heated by water we boiled in the turkey fryer.

Playing continued, no matter what! It just all centered in the living room, by the woodstove.

Doesn’t she look like an urchin, all smudged with soot?

Winter Sublime

Much is idyllic in our lives right now, and it has me in the silken web of family tether.

This time of year, since meeting my lifemate and beginning our family, has become increasingly more potent and powerful as the years come to us. From self-proclaimed and cheerful Grinch of the holidays to where I am now, the dark days of the winter solstice and the surrounding holidays have always been family to me. When family was a harsh, brittle entity, I hated these days. Now, I revel in them as much as anyone can.

We cut our Christmas tree this year at Alpine, a huge tree farm atop a hill in Port Orchard, almost to Belfair. The farm literally crests a high point in Port Orchard so high you have a breathtaking view of the snow-capped Olympics while you hike around looking for the perfect tree. Acre after acre of snow-covered farm lay stretched out before us in rolling hills of evergreen. We had our first family snowball fight of the year, and came home to trim the tree and drink hot cocoa by the fire, as we always do.

I don’tknow whether it’s because we were done quickly with purchasing our gifts this year or whether it was because we moved to a different city, but the Christmas Crazies don’t seem to be effecting us as much this year. Especially in this region, people tend to freak out out at Christmastime. We’ve done well to avoid that. This week I took a Toys for Tots gift into Starbucks when I went for knitting night. As I carried it in, another family was leaving, all aglow. The Mom said “See? She’s taking one in, too!” The gift receptacle was so full I had to cram mine in. I made my way to the counter to discover that the person before me, who was no longer in view (the family maybe?) had purchased my drink already.

G sat on Santa’s lap for the first time this year, and earlier we actually got to SEE it when the GH Santa made his neighborhood rounds with the firefighters. The kids, the parents and the neighborfamily all waited together. The cheering and candy cane slurping that went on after that made the little bit of cold and waiting worthwhile.

We have Christmas parties planned this year, which will be very nice. We haven’t really done one since we’ve been to Washington and we’re looking forward to the holidays.