snow – Page 2 – The MoHo and Other Traveling Tales

Love that wood heat…most of the time

we go from this: to this:

with this:

That pile on the porch is about what we use in two weeks keeping the house warm. This time we only made it to Monday, though, which means we burned half a cord of wood in about 10 days. Whew! Today it was about 10 when we got up and by the time we started to move wood it was all the way up to 18. I don’t believe it, though, because with that little soft breeze blowing, it felt like it was 10 again.

I love wood heat. It keeps me warmer than any other kind of heat, bar none. I am warmer in my house here than I ever am in California with the gas turned up as high as I can stand it. It cost me 400 bucks a month to heat my house in Jamestown during the winter and 500 a month to cool it in summer. Yeah it was older and not very well insulated, but still. When I am tromping up the stairs here, however, hauling the wood from the trailer up the steps to the back porch, huffing and puffing away, I wonder just how long we will manage to do this. Once back inside the warm house I have no doubts at all. Love it.

It’s been a quiet week since New Years. We have been staying home, feeding the fire, doing small house chores. I have been working on soils “stuff”, knitting, and finally getting around to reading “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”. The Kindle I ordered should be here sometime this week, and my first purchase will be the next book in the series.

I actually managed to get out my cross country skis, (the first time since I left Klamath to work in California in 2006) and shusshed around on the local roads a bit. Cross country skis on my feet aren’t made to go down hills. At least not any more. Guess I am going to have to practice a bit and get my balance back, but it was still fun.

Yesterday my daughter Melody brought her family out to Rocky Point to enjoy the deep snows and get in some great sledding. The skies were sunny, with temperatures that weren’t so cold you couldn’t have fun and we certainly did. Mo has an old sled that is everyone’s favorite, but the big green thingy I bought from Costco wasn’t a bad ride either. Kwankae, Melody’s exchange student from Thailand, had a great time as well, laughing in the snow. This is her first year for snow, since that is something you certainly don’t find in Thailand. I loved the chance to make a couple batches of peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies, knowing that I could send most of them home with the kids. We all drank hot chocolate and ate cookies and laughed about all the “air time” the kids got jumping over the moguls on the old roads around our house. Speaking of wood heat, after we all got back in the house, everyone really loved backing up to the wood stove to warm their buns!

In less than two weeks I’ll be flying to Florida with my eldest daughter to board a cruise ship to the Eastern Caribbean. Yippee! Wood heat is wonderful, but white beach sand heat is a whole lot better!

Do I REALLY want to be here?

I swore I didn’t need to post another photo of snow at Rocky Point, but I was wrong. After returning home from our desert travels on Monday afternoon, it was wonderful to be here. At first. The snow was manageable and home was so welcoming and comfortable once the fire was blazing in the woodstove and we warmed our achy bones with a dip in the hot tub under the night sky.

Yesterday, however, was a different story. The snow that came down on Tuesday was thick and soupy and it rained hard all night before turning to a deep fluffy powder by morning. We woke to a windy winter wonderland of snow laden firs, and another round of plowing, even though Mo spent a good part of the day before on the tractor.

Mo runs the tractor, I do the shoveling and we often share the snow blower duties. After two hours of shoveling a foot thick load of moderately heavy snow over a six inch dead weight of frozen slush, I was ready to move to Florida. Mo could barely push the stuff around with the tractor, and spent nearly three hours out there trying to get our road cleared down to Rocky Point Road. Once again, I was the grumpy one. Hmm, do I see a pattern here? I was so sick of lifting heavy snow, trying to toss it, only to have the entire load stick to the shovel and jerk me around, that I just said, “I quit. I am done. No more.” As luck would have it, I had managed to get the most of the snow out of the way enough that Mo could get the plow in the rest of the way.

Of course, I had to move my truck out of the way first, (we store Mo’s Lexus and the baby car in the garage) and it was frozen solid. I jerked and swore, and finally went inside to find the hair dryer to try to melt the frozen gunk all around the door seams. Eventually I got the door open, and the frozen stuff removed enough from the windows that I could see to back the truck out into a spot across the road so Mo could continue to plow.

I decided to ease my grumpiness with a soothing daytime dip into the hot tub, of course I had to break some icicles and sweep off a bunch of snow to get into it. Now remind me again, why do I love living in Rocky Point? Oh yeah, it’s really pretty in the summer and the winter snows are gorgeous.

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By late afternoon, the snow finally stopped, and Mo came back from her foray to the mailbox all excited, (at least as excited as she usually gets which is pretty low key). She wanted to take me out to Rocky Point Road, which hadn’t been plowed at all during the entire day and looked wonderful. The baby car has studded tires and four wheel drive, so it was great fun running around the neighborhood and checking out all the deep drifts, the snow laden forest, and the unplowed roads. I jumped in and out of the car, snapping away, oohing and aahing at how beautiful the lake looked through the trees, how clean and white the snow looked, and decided that moving to Florida really wasn’t an option after all.

Soup on a Monday night

The last few days have been mostly about snow. I got tired of putting up photos of snow and more snow, so decided to take a break from it. The photos, that is, not the snow. We got more than a foot again on Saturday night and spent almost 3 hours Sunday morning shoveling, plowing, and running the snow blower. I still managed to put up some Christmas lights on the big front porch, and take down a few Christmas things to make home all bright and cozy. I’ll be leaving on the 9th, and with the exception of the short space of time between my flight’s arrival at midnight in Medford, and our departure the next morning by 7 or so for Southern California, I won’t be home until after Christmas. I’m thinking I need to find a small little something to take with us in the MoHo. When we traveled during December in 2007 we had a nice wreath on the grille. Guess I can do that again, at least.

Today I went to work, but I must say, the sweet commute was anything but sweet this morning. The temperatures haven’t been above freezing for many days now and the road was icy and treacherous. In town it was just plain cold. Klamath Falls is in a basin, and the fog sometimes lies in thick during the winter. It’s ugly. My least favorite weather is cold, icy, gray fog, with steely, leaden skies. Ick. When I got home tonight I cooked up some great soup, a bit of a break from all the Thanksgiving leftovers. It made a nice supper for us while Mo watched the 49’rs do their thing and I escaped to the computer room to write and play with photos.

Zuppa Toscana Soup is one of my favorites. I think there are several recipes out there attempting to copy the famous Olive Garden soup, but my friend Maryruth of course, found the best one. I wonder if all that fresh kale offsets the Italian sausage, bacon, and cream. Hmmmm. Maybe I should get shoveling again.

After Rick showed us how to put a video in our blogs, I thought I would share this clip of Abby running through the pathways made by the snow blower. I couldn’t seem to get the clip under 15 seconds, however, per Rick’s suggestion, but 44 seconds is a lot better than the 3 minutes of video that I started with. Just like Rick’s dog Rylie, Abby gets all excited about playing in the snow. She loves it when she thinks we are heading out for a walk. She also loves the paths, and thinks they are made just for her. Sometimes an occasional neighbor dog will come down to try the paths out as well, much easier doing your business on a nice path than in the deep snow, right?

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Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving celebration turned out a bit smaller than planned, due partly to weather and the long miles between Portland and Klamath Falls. My eldest daughter and her sweetie didn’t make it this far south, and I missed her. However, my youngest daughter living in Klamath Falls came with my granddaughter Hillary and their new exchange student from Thailand, Kwankae. The man behind the camera is Melody’s long-suffering husband, Kevin. My sweet little grandson had to do the court ordered thing and spend the holiday with his father in Portland. Families can certainly get complicated, can’t they!

With horrendous icy road conditions, my sister was afraid to drive out to Rocky Point in her 2 wheel drive vehicle, so Mo made the trip to town twice to pick up Sally and my niece Savannah and return them late in the evening. That amounted to about 4 hours of icy driving, but Mo felt it was worth it to get Sally and Savannah to our home for the celebration. Thankful. I am just really thankful for so very much.

Just a little aside here: My sister and I share the same mother, she died when we were small children, and we were separated. I didn’t find her until 36 years later. Sally lived in many parts of the country before coming to live with me in Klamath Falls in 2003. After a year, she moved out on her own, making her own life and focusing on raising her fantastic, talented daughter Savannah. Of course, sisterhood isn’t without flaws, especially since we didn’t grow up together and came from such different backgrounds. For 36 years I didn’t have a sister, and now I do.

I had fun spending most of Wednesday cooking all that I could do early so Thursday morning was a breeze. Woke up too dang early, though, probably just excited, but at least I was awake in time to get the 20 pound turkey stuffed and in the oven before 8. Got a comment from a friend about our Thanksgiving table…not yet piled with food. Usually I forget to get the photo before dinner and then it’s too late after dinner and all the food is all messy looking. This time I forgot to take a photo of the food! LOL Here’s one of everything on the counter where we filled our plate. Turkey, old fashioned bread dressing with onion, celery, and tons of sage, mashers, gravy, homemade cranberry sauce, southern sherry glazed yams with pecans, fruit salad, that silly green lime jello thingy (for old time’s sake), and 4 kinds of pie for dessert. The daughter that couldn’t make it had our traditional cream cheese veggies with her, so we didn’t have them this year. Somehow the plates were completely full anyway, even if two chairs were not.

Mid-afternoon, with the sun shining and making the frigid air seem a bit less daunting, we all bundled up to go outside and try out the new Costco sled I picked up the other day. Of course, Mo’s antique sled with runners, a real one, did much better in the snow and the three teenagers had a good time laughing and falling and playing in the snow. They were great sports, no complaints at all about the weather, the cold, or Grandma’s silly plastic sled.

Just for fun, here is a photo of the last time I had Thanksgiving for my family. A few more managed to get to Klamath back then in 2003, and it wasn’t easy then either. Thanksgiving has always been special to me, it’s the holiday that is specifically for family, without any other agenda, and I love that about it. Well, of course, there is the food part, but without family that would be irrelevant.

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Melody is in the front row with my grandson on her lap, Hillary and Savannah have changed a bit in seven years, I think. I am on the right, next to my first-born daughter, my sister next to her, my two grandsons in the rear (both now Iraq veterans), my middle daughter next to her husband holding my first great grandchild and a step granddaughter. These family pictures track the history for us, the changes in family dynamics, where everyone has been, where we are going perhaps. Yes, it’s a bit nostalgic, and yes, so very much fun, and yes yes yes, I am grateful for my family.

Snowy weekend

The snow has come for real to Rocky Point, with enough on the road yesterday that Mo had to plow. She fires up the tractor for the road leading to the house (aptly named Easy Street), and I get out the shovel and do the big driveway by hand. We have a snow blower as well, but I only get that out when the stuff is really deep, at least a foot or two. Yesterday it was just 2 inches, and this morning another 2 inches. I think an hour of shoveling up and down that driveway qualifies for at least half of my ten thousand steps a day, (which I haven’t actually done in a very long time). Difference between our snow and Rick’s snow is that ours probably won’t melt. If you have a dog, or know a dog, or just want to laugh from joy, drop over to Rick’s page and check out his video of Rylie running around in the snow. Abby doesn’t get quite so excited, although I do have some videos of her doing similar silly stuff in water, warm! water that is.

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When I moved back to Rocky Point last year, I packed up a lot of boxes of stuff, even after a year of thinning and selling and giving away stuff, I still have stuff to deal with. Mo has a small shed out back, and in that shed are some chests and boxes, including a great drawer full of travel brochures and memorabilia. I went out there yesterday to find something and came upon an old travel journal. Mo and I have traveled together since mid 2003, and it was great to find all those old handwritten stories tucked away with places, dates, all the details that we forget as the years continue. Sometimes we go to the blog to try to remember a trip, or a date, and it is a bit frustrating to find that what we are trying to remember is pre-blog.

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I decided it would be a good idea to go back in time and add those old trips and photos here. I was a little bit concerned that the posts would show up all over the place as recent, but I checked a few blog rolls and it seems that as long as I remember to put the right publish date, blog followers won’t be bombarded with ancient history. It’s fun to go through the stories and photos and get it all down in proper blog format. I find I enjoy my own memories more with the illustrations accompanying the text, so it’s a great little trip down memory lane. Mo thought is would be nice to have everything in one place as well. I didn’t start blogging our travels until we were on our cross country trip back to Florida, and we started that trip in the baby MoHo and bought the current one on our return trip, but that story is here. The prior stories are coming along. I know that I don’t often crawl back in blog archives to see someone’s history. So much is going on right in the present it’s often hard to keep up!

This week I get to remember that I really am retired. I don’t have to work at all! The weekend has been great, with shoveling, hauling another load of crackling dry juniper to the porch for the fire, cooking, cleaning, and some good knitting and tv watching as well. We had three Grey’s Anatomy shows stacked up on the DVR so that was great fun, not having to wait a whole week for the outcome, just fast forward. Today I am continuing with the cleaning projects, and have all my Cooks Illustrated magazines out on the counter looking for some new recipes for Thanksgiving. I know better than to mess with family classics, but I can at least experiment with an extra here and there. Half my children will be here with spouses and kids, the other half are in other parts of the country. I am really looking forward to a big dinner, to the cooking and camaraderie, to family time. The four years I was in California were hard for me, my family couldn’t manage the distance to travel to me, and I haven’t hosted the holiday at my home since 2003, when I still lived in Klamath Falls. Family and food and fun. Mo’s brothers are up north, and her sister is in Colorado, so they don’t often manage to get everyone together for Thanksgiving. So Mo will be here as well, patiently tolerating and even enjoying my family and all it’s craziness.