Tuesday, January 26, 2016

When the refrigerator dies

You can hope it happens in winter.

I knew when I went to get the frozen blueberries to put in the oatmeal we were in trouble. Not that things were totally mush, but they were on their way. It died either the previous afternoon or during the night. Ever since we moved here it's been noisy, especially when it shut off. Sometimes it sounded like someone might be coming in the back door, an unsettling thought when we're in bed with the lights out. Kind of a refrigerator death rattle.

Not hearing it thump away every hour or so might have been a clue but who notices a sound that isn't there?

There are two pieces of good news. First, we're renting, it's not our refrigerator, and the landlords are replacing it. Second, while I was cleaning it out, I found a bottle of Guinness that had been shoved way to the back and forgotten.

On the flip side, the old fridge was 24" wide and 63" high. Hardly anything comes that size anymore and to make the space for a new one a shelf had to be removed and a tall, narrow cupboard I'd built to go beside the old fridge to hold cookie sheets and things like that will no longer have a home. Still, a new refrigerator is coming.

Today.

Which means we've had several hours keeping stuff cold or as close to frozen as we could keep it. At first, it all went onto the back porch. It was 17 degrees that morning. That held for a while but then the temperatures climbed into the 40s. Finally, though, with a couple coolers to deal with the critical stuff, and our unheated front hall we've managed the rest.

The new one will be here this afternoon.

Listen, it could have been August...

Friday, January 15, 2016

Accepting Winter

I know, I know...

Winter is cold and wet and icy and slippery and annoying. I still have to clear the steps and the walk and brush off the car, of course, but I no longer have to go outside towork when it's 30 below with the wind blowing. Well, I do currently have a part time driving job, but if the weather's bad enough to cancel or delay school, we follow suit. So even though winter can be cold and cruel and dark it's now mainly someone else's challenge.

Someone else can clear the snow off the roof for instance. I've done my share. The first was my grandfather's porch roof. Later I had to clear the roof of my own house in Brattleboro several times. I'm not planning to ever build another house, but if I do it's going to have a slippery metal roof.

The last time I cleared the roof, back in the late 90s, I realized almost instantly I had no business being up there. Being on a roof, especially a snow covered roof, requires a certain nimbleness which I no longer have. Still, I was up there and it had to be cleared. First the ell in the rear, then the back part of the main house, then up and over the ridge to clear the front. I'd nearly got the front done when the shovel slipped out of my hands and over the side. I decided it was a sign I'd done enough but when I tried to climb back up over the ridge so I could get to the ladder the roof was so slippery I couldn't do it. I stamped on the roof to get Susan's attention so she could come out and move the ladder around to the front. No response. I spent the next ten minutes waving to friends who chose that moment to drive by. I waved and stamped my foot. The friends smiled and waved back and drove away. Susan ignored it all, even when I stamped SOS in Morse Code.

The roof wasn't all that high and the snow pile I'd created was fairly deep. I could jump off. Which I did. Clear to my armpits.

I haven't been on a roof since.

I have to say it's easier to accept winter now. At most, it's a nuisance.

And with that settled, everything else looks better, too.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Just a thought...

So I was wondering...

There are millions of cars on the road and those millions of cars use billions of tires, tires that wear down and have to be replaced with more tires that will wear down. And this has been going on for years.

Where do you suppose all that stuff that wears off our billions of tires has gone?

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Of course, there's a story here...



 

So
Actually, this is snow toilet #2.

The first was built when my kids were high school age. I'd come home one afternoon when the snow was perfect and they all wanted me to make a snow sculpture. Years before I had made huge rabbits or squirrels out of snow, big enough that I had to get a stepladder to finish the top. If we were lucky we'd get a hard freeze the next day and the sculptures would last for days or even a couple weeks.

Snowmen, the ones with the three balls stacked up, were always a bit ho-hum, except the one time when I was determined to make a huge one. I pushed the first ball around until it was about 4 feet in diameter. Then the second was so heavy I couldn't get it up onto the first one. To hell with it.

My father sometimes got the bug to play in the snow and he made things like rabbits or sheep. Usually they were lying down so he didn't have to deal with legs. Once, since he was into trains, he even created a steam engine. He never had to use a ladder, though.
So then I came home that day when the snow was right and the kids said it was time to build a sculpture again. Forget it, I said.. It was near the end of the day, I was tired, and when the snow's right you have to work hard and fast. They kept after me, though.

"All right, what'll it be?"

"A big toilet," Tonja said. "We ought to make a big toilet."

So I found my buckskin mittens, grabbed a couple shovels, and we all went to work. At least I had help building the pile. We had it nearly shaped when it all collapsed. Some of the neophytes didn't understand about packing the snow on the bottom. By now the sun was about to go behind the hill and the snow would soon lose some of it's workability. In the end, though, with all of us working on it, we finished just as it was getting dark. The final touch was to shove the rake handle into a snow to stand beside the toilet.

We were on a busy corner in Brattleboro and a lot of people saw the toilet.Several people stopped to take a picture of it. One woman laughed as she got out of her car and said she thought it could be improved witht a brown stain or two. 

When we were living in England I'd told some of the neighbors about the Brattleboro toilet. We hadn't seen a lot of snow over there. They used to have proper winters but the last 30 years or so significant snow has been so rare that some of the younger people don't even know about snow tires. A little snow and everything shuts down, much like Georgia or North Carolina.

But there was snow one day, about 4 inches of wet, sticky snow, the perfect sculpting snow. I called Jon Parker, one of our neighbors. He and his wife were teachers and he did some fairly intricate woodworking as a hobby. They'd heard of the Brattleboro Toilet.

"Come on over, Jon. Now's the time. We'll build another toilet."

So Jon arrived a few minutes later with his son Robbie in tow. I had a couple five gallon pails and I put them both to work collecting snow from the stone patio since it was cleaner and easier than scraping snow off the lawn. We'd not been working very long when Robbie, who clearly hadn't got into the spirit of things, decided it was all a ruse to get our patio cleared. He put down his shovel and went home. Jon stuck around, though, and we kept working.

In the beginning, I think, Jon was hesitantly game. He joined in because I'd invited him. Before long, though, he got caught up in details and his precision woodworking gene took over and my work wasn't quite accurate enough. I had to get him a long bread knife so he could slice the snow to a straight and precise shape. Funny how people suddenly get on board and take a bit of ownership in a project.

In about a hour we had it finished. Word spread through the village and even up to neighboring Walgrave. People began to stop by. The toilet wasn't visible from the street like the Brattleboro Toilet since it was in what was in our "back garden". Susan and I called it our back yard but we were corrected. In England a "yard" is where you might park construction equipment, tractors and things. Was it a lawn, then? No, no. It was a garden laid to grass.

And that's the story. Facebook reminded me it happened 6 years ago. Sometimes our four and a half years in England is like another lifetime. Other times it's like just last week. 

If you'd like a street view of Hannington, the village where we lived, you can find it on Google Earth. Search for Hannington, Northamptonshire, England.