Update January 9

Apparently, this winter is turning out terribly for getting anything done. It's been wicked cold, and the weather's been awful, with snow, drizzle, freezing rain and sleet just about every time you turn around. Ugh. I don't know how Canadians do it! This Monday (tomorrow), they're predicting more than .10 inches of freezing rain accumulation = power outages. We've been through that before. My favorite part is sleeping in the middle of the night, in complete and utter silence, until you hear a large splitting crash from trees decapitating themselves around your house. That's fun.

Last time, we lived on Ashebrook (a scant half mile or so from our current location) with no natural gas anything, a pitiful fireplace, and a waterbed. For those of you unschooled in waterbed lore, they are/can be wonderful things, with warm water all the time, comfortable positions being achieved at anytime for sleeping, and a good workout for your abs when you want to get out. However, it needs a water heater underneath the mattress so the water isn't so cold that it leaches all the warmth straight out of your body. So no power = icy bed. Unfun to sleep in when it's 40 degrees in your house.

This time, we have a kerosene heater (lots of windows), a carbon monoxide detector (for you worrywarts), lots of candles, back up batteries for almost all our appliances, gas water heater, gas stove, and a healthy optimism for the chance of a decent lifestyle even without power. We can cook on the stove or the grill, we can take hot showers, and we can sleep in a room that's large that can be shut off from the rest of the house so that we don't lose all the heat. We also have lots of books we need to read. :o) We'll see, but I think we're far more prepared this time.

So this weekend, we made sure we have access to all the things we thought we might need, including the hunt for some items. We also put an insulation blanket on the water heater (out in the unheated utility room off the carport-converted-garage), and finally floored part of the attic! We were able to get a lot of stuff up there, out of the way, so we could work on getting other stuff organized in the utility room.

And now we can finally start transporting stuff from our other storage area to this one so we can have all our crap in one place. Yay! That will help me figure out exactly what we still have and what we need to finally get rid of. I couldn't part with anything from the other house yet because I didn't know what we'd need/want here, and I certainly don't want to have to get rid of something and then pay for it again when I realized I shouldn't have deleted it from our belongings.

I've also been doing some re-organizing and trying to figure out where to put all of our clothing crap . . . the usual stuff.

So not much here except preparing for the apocalypse.