Friday the Thirteenth
Friday the thirteenth falls on a Sunday this month. Sorry for the lag in posts, but settling into a new house and getting a new rescue mutt makes for a busy time.
Georgia is settling in pretty well. She’s testing a lot of boundaries, and it’ll be a few months of getting her expectations aligned with actual reality, we’re sure. We are doing formal training with this dog, as Marcia can’t walk her right now – Georgia would pull her over right away. But it’ll all work out. Hardest thing at the moment: finding her toys that she can’t destroy quickly that won’t instead destroy her teeth and gums.
Georgia and I took a walk up to the nearby (retired?) quarry last week. She had fun sniffing everything and trying to pull me over. I had fun looking at the rusty old gear, and trying to keep my feet on a mostly ice-based walking surface.
Chores
Maine remains a chore-filled place. Today, for example… Due to extraordinarily good planning on my part, I had to be up at 0630 on the morning of Daylight Stealing Time, to do production OS patching at work. Following that, I did the following activities today:
- The bi-weekly cleaning of the pellet stove and the wood stove.
- Shoveled the driveway by hand, since we only got about 2.5″ of snow yesterday afternoon into evening. The downside of not shoveling a light fall is that it partly melts, then turns into an ice rink. So it’s better to clear it quickly. And it’s faster by shovel than by machine, with a light fall.
- Roasted coffee (the second pound of a tasty Guatemalan from Sweet Maria’s Coffee)
- Fabricated a new wood rack for near the basement wood stove, to make it easier to manage for Marcia when she’s downstairs sewing, etc.
- Used wedge and sledge to split some more of the large split wood into smaller split wood – more appropriate sizes for Marcia and our particular woodstove.
We’re about halfway through our regular stock of pellets for the stove. I’ll have to go out and pick up another load in about a week and a half. That batch might carry us right through into the warm (though I doubt it). I buy (25) forty pound bags of pellets at a time, and stock them into the upper garage, bringing a bag in to the house as needed. Here’s what three and a half weeks of heating for the house looks like in the back of the truck:
As we start to ramp our days back up into 40+ degree Fahrenheit temperatures, the pellet stove shuts itself off for several hours in the middle of the day, so our consumption of pellets should go down by twenty or twenty five percent over the next month.
That’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. Time to go grab a shower, and get ready to start another week… Be well.
