07 March 2007

the homesteading lifestyle?

as i am now living more rurally than ever before, i thought that i might take this time to reflect upon three new things that have happened to me over the winter of 2006-2007.

1. cooking on a wood stove.
i have never lived somewhere where you buy gas by the tank, and therefore, can run out. luckily, we have a wood stove, otherwise, we couldn't have cooked anything. this happened in december, i think, and i made a delicious roasted chicken and baked potato feast. lemons to lemonade anyone?

2. chimney fire.
one night a month-or-so-ago, our chimney started to shoot flames like a torch. it sounded like a jet engine. i mean, it was nighttime, so, you could really really see how high the flames were. and sparks. lots of sparks. but, a chimney is a fairly contained space, so fires go out quickly. by the time the volunteer fire department showed up, it was mostly just sparks. they went through the motions, though, and put up spot lights and climbed onto the roof, and scraped down the inside with this fancy brush, and looked at the chimney through an infrared camera so that they could tell if there were any hot spots, and wore these fancy yellow outfits, and fell down on the ice. i was preoccupied, because i was in charge of getting the littles out of harm's way, and i could only find piggy. bingo knows to hide when the cat carriers come out of the closet. but, the big gq got his guitar. so, we were 2 for 3 of important things getting out in case the house went down. or, up in flames, i guess is a better phrase. maybe we should take Chas Tenenbaums' lead and start having safety drills. and wearing matching track suits.

3. no running water.
this morning, the big gq woke me up by saying that the pipes were frozen. i couldn't pee, brush my teeth, or shower. it was a little bit shocking. then, he had to chip all this ice off of the window into the space under the house, which isn't quite a basement, but he couldn't fit through the window. he is big. so then, he went to find his sister, to make her go under the house, and i was all, i'm little, i can go. but he thought that it would take hours and hours to thaw the pipes with a little heat gun (technically my embosser for rubber stamping), and i have to go on the boat in order to go to work. (the boat waits for no man.) so, then his sister came with a super-duper hot gun-thing, and the big gq wedged himself into the hole, and heated the pipes. he was wearing a head lamp. presto-changeo the water came back on full force. i mean, running everywhere, so we had to adjust the faucets so that they continued to trickle down the pipes and hopefully prevent freezing. so, gq is focused on hooking up a heater under the house today, and running a fire in the wood-stove at full blast to keep our little house as warm as possible.

can you believe it?

1 comment:

Katie Wilson said...

Check out this homesteading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/realestate/keymagazine/318HSUPCLOSE.t.html