"United we bargain, divided we beg."

Monday, January 16, 2012

Snow at Last (On Being Unprepared)

The "puff-room."

There are about eight inches of snow on the ground right now, and it's still coming down. I don't mind snow - I actually like snow. We've all been waiting for snow this year, and we are pretty happy that it's finally here. The little girls spent most of the day outside yesterday, apparently oblivious to the cold. Whenever they would come inside, I'd ply them with hot chocolate, put their wet clothes in the dryer, and send them into the "puff-room." The puff-room is a tent made by throwing a down quilt over the heater grate. The girls crawl under there with their teddy bears and curl up together, getting warm. As my sister pointed out, it looks like Epcott center, but it really works!

View of the front pasture

For the past two days, it's looked pretty much the picture above: grey skies, with snow falling five minutes on, five minutes off. Homero has been working out in the shop, poor man. We don't have any paying work right now, so he's been making biodiesel and working on the diesel bug, which lately tops out at thirty miles an hour. After several hours out in the shop I'm sure he wishes he could visit the puff-room.

The Dogwood Tree.

I should really make more of an effort to read the weather reports. I can't say the snow caught me entirely off guard, but I had the idea it would be no more than a dusting, not a snowstorm that would have us stuck at home for at least two days. When I find myself stranded at home for even a day or two, I realize how woefully unprepared I am.

Firstly; we are stuck not because the roads are truly impassible, but simply because all the tires on all of our vehicles are smooth as cue balls. We are incredibly lazy (and Homero is incredibly cheap) about replacing tires on time. If the truck had decent tires we could get around. At least down to the feed store, which is pretty important because -

Secondly; there is no chicken food or pig food in the barn. Ran out yesterday. Those damn pigs! They eat like... well, like pigs, but they never seem to grow! We are so tired of having them around (Pig Farming is Not Sexy) and really really want them to be ready for slaughter. To that end, we have been feeding them even more than usual... but it just doesn't seem to make much difference. I don't know if the cold is making them use more energy than they would if it were summer, but it seems logical. Anyway, we go through a fifty pound bag in three days, and that's with all the kitchen scraps on top of it.

Since I seldom have a hundred bucks to drop at the feed store at any given time, I can't really stock up. We're out again. This morning I cleaned out the cupboards and the fridge and found enough stale bread, old cereal, wrinkly apples, limp carrots, and pieces of hard old cheese to tide them over for the morning feeding, but I'm going to have to try to get out to the feed store before nightfall.
Pigs in the Snow.

Thirdly, there's no milk in the house. Or cheese. Or fruit. Or cereal. Or beer, damn it. I really must learn to pay attention to details like groceries and the weather!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, hey, you could eat the pigs now and solve 2 problems at once! ;)

www.FarmLifeLessons.blogspot.com said...

Things like that happen here in Texas, but with horrendous downpours that cause widespread flooding and make it impossible for an outing, unless you want a ruined vehicle. When my kids were school-age, I would watch the news every morning at 5am to get the daily report so I could yell out, "It's not a flip-flop" day. However, these days, I'm officially an empty nester and slowly have been moving away from television reports, but it sure can make me surprised as a terrible storms rolls in overhead.

I'm glad you had old food!! Hey, think of it this way...your procrastination with cleaning out the old food was actually wise-thinking...you had some back-up hold-em-over food because you did such a great job in keeping the old apples, etc! There's always something to find to pat yourself on the back for in the midst of a snow storm!

You made me laugh --- glad we hardly ever get snow!

From Texas,
Lana

Aimee said...

ECTH: tempting, very tempting!

The Idiot said...

There's only one thing that beats pigs in the snow - pigs in the oven!

Olive said...

I wish it would snow here...it NEVER snows here, last week we had a couple of days over 40C