Grandmother's Wood Burning Stove

I remember my father's mother very well.  She spent lots of time with me as I was growing up and she was that quintessential "granny" that every child loves to have.  I have many memories of her, such as her trying to get me to eat more and feeding me one bite every time I would swing back and forth on the swing, just so I'd get the full meal down. 

I remember he pulling weeds in a back yard that, to me, was pretty much all weeds.  But she seemed to get some enjoyment out of it, and I got to play uninterrupted, so I didn't mind.  But this post is about her stove.

Mostly, my grandmother came to me to visit.  She would stay in our house and she'd take care of me before and after school while my parents were at work.  It was always fun when she was around.  Every so often though, I'd go to her house and spend time with her.  I remember being there and waiting for her to cook dinner.  She would spend long amounts of time making more food than my cousins or I could eat, but boy, was it good food.

What I remember vaguely though, was that in the middle of this house, she had a wood burning stove.  She would pile in wood and when the top got hot, she would cook things on top of it.  It was black and it looked scary to me.  I stayed away, but I definitely ate all the food she made from it.

I spoke with my father about it recently.  He told me she was a hazard using that stove, but she insisted.  She would leave logs hanging out and they'd fall off and nearly burn the floor.   She apparently had a regular electric stove, but she didn't want to use it. 

My memories are so vague and yet clear at the same time of the days I spent with her at her house, eating her cornbread and other food she had learned how to make when she was a young girl. 

The Big Boy Update:  "Here, heart me."  "I'll heart you."  Things my son said to his sister while playing with a stethoscope. 

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  quaaawwwwkkkk.   She's making this quacking, growling, squawking noise lately as she runs around.  It's odd, but it's so toddler.

Fitness Update:  Eight miles in thirty-degree weather with my neighbor this morning.  We were so cold, and then we got so hot.  We forgot to run into the park because we started running later than normal and we didn't even think about the fact that it was light and we could run in the park, we'd run in the dark so much lately.

I Learned Two Things Today

It's not a good day if you don't learn something.  Most days we learn things, usually trivial or inconsequential, but learning goes on, weather we notice it or not.  That's life.  The two things I learned today were musical in nature. 

There was a brief audio clip I heard in the course of the days events, either on television or radio or somewhere that reminded me of something and it stuck with me.  It was a snippet of the song, Jump in The Line (a song title I had to figure out by playing the song forward in my mind until I got to the chorus part) that reminded me of the movie Beetle Juice.

Tonight, I decided to buy the song in iTunes.  I found it easily and downloaded it to my phone.  Then I began dancing around the house, holding the phone and making everyone else around wonder if I'd drank too much or perhaps just lost it for good.  I was not concerned, I was happy dancing and if they didn't think I was crazy already, a little more emphasis wouldn't hurt.

So  about those two things I learned,  first, I discovered the song was  by Harry Belafonte.  I'd heard the name for as long as I can remember and associated him with music from my parent's age.  Then, after downloading the song, I learned my second thing of the day: Harry Belafonte was black.  

I had no association at all with his music or his ethnicity, only the era his music was from.  Now that I know a wee bit more about him, I like him.  Is it possible as we get older we branch out both forwards and backwards in music appreciation?

The Big Boy Update:  Yesterday and it's friends.  My son thinks anything that happened in the past was, "yesterday".  It took us a while to realize this.  He's not telling a fib, he truly thinks things that happened recently were all, "yesterday".

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   The facial funk.  It's still there.  And I'm not thrilled about putting yeast infection medication on her face, but it appears it's going to take a few more days to get it eradicated. 

And on the Funny Side:  My cousin wrote me a check last night for something I'd gotten for her on Amazon.com and today as I put it in my wallet to deposit I misread the quotation as the check was upside down.  I thought it was great though:  " To God be the glory.  Great savings he hath done."  What a great quote, I thought, that God was supporting us in our bank account savings.  It was then that I realized I'd misread what it really said:  "Great things he hath done." 

That Coffee Pot Thing

We went to Practice Thanksgiving last weekend at our friend's house and they had hot spiced cider to drink.  I love hot spiced cider.  I like making it for holiday parties and I like drinking it in general any time of the year. 

I usually put a big pot on the oven, add in a gallon of apple cider and add mulling spices to it.  When it's hot and ready I put mugs by the stove and people use a ladle to fill up a mug.  And that's worked well, only there's usually a bit of a mess around the area.  My friends had an altogether better solution, they had a big coffee pot thing.

It's one of those things you see at company meetings where you put your mug up to the container, pull the lever down and coffee comes out right into your cup.  They had just used it for making cider.  What a great idea.   They prepared the cider beforehand and when people started arriving, they plugged it in and in a few minutes, they had hot cider ready.

And I wanted one of those coffee pot things.  I asked my father-in-law the next day what they were called.  I was looking on Amazon under "coffee pot" and I was coming up with over seventeen-hundred results.  He wasn't sure, so he asked my mother-in-law.  She immediately called out, "you want a coffee urn." 

And that's what they're called.  I found a very nice one for thirty-eight dollars including shipping.  It arrived yesterday evening.  I was ready with my wassail recipe with apple juice, spices, sliced orange and lemon.  Oh, and the wine and rum.  I filled up the urn and was ready to turn it on for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Today, I turned it on.  I turned it on early.  I drank wassail from four-thirty to nine o'clock.  It's a good thing wassail isn't that strong or I'd be laid out by now.  I am very fond of my new coffee urn.  For Christmas, I'm going to make spiced cider.  

The Big Boy Update:  "The sun is getting wet."  My son was looking outside yesterday at the rain.  He and Mimi talked about how it was landing on the deck and splashing.  He looked at her and said, "the sun is getting wet."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Busted lip.  Two days ago she fell in the garage and split her lip.  She was upset for a short while and it stopped bleeding rather quickly, but the next morning it looked frightful.  It's still swollen today and has a large vertical gray scab.  It doesn't seem to bother her much, but I've been having her put chap stick on it to keep it moist while it heals.

Fatness Update:  At least, that's how I feel after Thanksgiving dinner tonight.  It was a delightful night with family and friends and I'd gladly do it again (but give me a year to recuperate first).

I Have a Second Blog

I do, it's true.  It even has a name.  Only it doesn't really exist.  It's the blog location for all the thing that just don't fit here.

There are things I think about that would make sense to put in a personal diary, but not to share on the internet.  There are things I think about that I know would cause me to lose all three of my readers were I to write posts about them.   Trust me, there are things I think about that you just don't want to know about.  

So when those ideas come up, and believe me they do, I just pretend to write them up while I sit in the tub relaxing after putting the children to bed.  And I smile.  Because usually, those posts make me laugh, even though they'd make everyone else cringe.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is fond of one of his teachers, Kica.  He sometimes tells her her last name is the same as ours, so our running joke with her is that she's a member of our family.  Coming home the other day I asked him as we drove into our driveway, "who lives here?"  He replied, "daddy."  I then asked him if anyone else lived here and he said, "Kica."  So I asked him if he lived here and he said, "no, I live at school."  Kica tells us about my son's days at school and some of the funny things he says and does.  He was having a problem with, "a need to move" and one day he went to the back door, turned to Kica and said, "Kica, I need to run."  So she opened the door, he went out and ran around in circles until he was calm enough to come back into the classroom and focus on his work.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  "Happy know clap hand hoo ray"  My daughter is picking up new songs more quickly now.  One of the most recent ones is, If You're Happy and You Know it.   She will go on and on after signing it together with us, but the longer she sings, the more words she leaves out and the more verses she combines.  This is true with most of her songs.  By the time we got to the grocery store last night, she was happily and enthusiastically repeating, "happy know clap hands hoo ray!"

Fitness Update:  Headache, possibly a migraine, but I wanted to go to the gym with my neighbor this morning because she had some news she wanted to share with me that was important to her family.  It was a rough workout but I'm glad I went because we did have a chance to talk.

You'll Need a Lot of Spoons (and the move-in meltdown)

I found out I was pregnant the week we signed a contract to start building our house.  My son was born a week before we moved in to that same house, two weeks after our first wedding anniversary.  It was a busy year.

If it weren't for the help of our parents, it would have been far more difficult and much more stressful.  My son was unexpectedly delivered four weeks early and that didn't help with our schedule and planning either. 

But we made it work.  It was an exciting holiday season, what with a new baby, a new house and family all around us.  And it was busy.  We had so much to do house-wise and we had a small child that also needed a lot of our time.  There was so much to be done I had trouble prioritizing sometimes and getting anything done.

For instance, I would leave the bedroom to go to the kitchen to get one thing done, see something in the living room that I could possibly do on the way, stop to do that, realize I needed to get something else in the bedroom, go back, get confused at where I was going in the first place and walk to the kitchen, look around and realize I'd completely forgotten what thing I was about to do because I'd seen so much else that needed to be done along the distracted way.

And stuff...we had so much stuff out and in our faces.  Usually, most of our stuff is put away and I don't have to think about all the tureens and wine glasses or the paperback books because they're put up.  But when so much of your "stuff" is out and visible, it's mentally distracting.  Okay, well it is to someone who likes a tidy and organized house.  Some people prefer to be in an environment surrounded by lots of things and they find that comfortable.  For me though, it was way too much mental static.

It was about this time that a good friend of ours sent over, via my parents, some random things she thought I might be able to use.  It was stuff that needed to go in different areas of the house, like the craft area or the children's toy area or the kitchen area and it was all piled into one box.  And right about then, I was about to snap from too many things and too many decisions to be made and I didn't want to see a box of random junk I might not even want from someone else.

One of the things in that box was a stack of baby spoons.  Our friend had said, "you're going to need a lot of spoons when he starts eating solids."  And okay, I believed her, but these spoons were random and different and I had a child that was eight-days-old and I didn't have any clue where my utensils were, much less where the baby spoons were going to go.  My husband looked at them and said, "this one's from Dairy Queen.  It's not even a baby spoon."

It was about then that I had my meltdown.  I just couldn't take any more right at that moment.   My mother-in-law was in the room and she said, "give me the spoons" and with a big flourish, she threw them in the trash.   And we laughed.  And I felt better.  It was something little, but it helped a lot.

Today, I think back about that conversation and those spoons.  I think about how we scoffed at the spoon from Dairy Queen and I think how foolish we were to shun the spoon just because it was designed to be disposable.  Today, the spoons my children love the most are the ones we saved from a frozen yogurt store in Florida two years ago.  We saved two then, and we got four more of the same style from another store in another town much later.

Sometimes it takes time to learn something valuable.

The Big Boy Update:  "I made Batman."  My son had a cookie for dessert.  He took one bite out of the left side of the round cookie and then he took a similar-sized bite out of the right side.  He held the remaining cookie up and realized it looked a bit like the batman symbol.  When he showed me, I realized he was completely right.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  We walked out from the grocery store tonight in rather heavy rain.  I was pushing my daughter in the cart and I told her we were going to get wet.  She smiled and told me she could feel the rain.  She held out her hand and caught raindrops and then wanted to see if my hand was catching raindrops too.  After we got into the car, she said to me, "Let's do it again."

The Stinky Closet and Other Odoriferous Issues

We have a closet that smells bad.  It didn't start out that way, it developed suddenly, when something died.   More challenging, is how to make the closet stop smelling.  I'm going to have to rewind to explain how we got to this point and how we're not that surprised or upset.

We have an "encapsulated crawl space" under the house, or the half of the house that isn't basement.  By encapsulated, it means the space is relatively sealed in and is factored into the overall envelope of space for heating and cooling purposes.  It doesn't mean you're heating and cooling extra space, it means that space is protected from the outside temperatures so the ambient temperature is closer to the inside of the house.  Ultimately, it should be a cost savings, when implemented correctly.

It's a nice crawl space.  It's lined with thick plastic over the gravel and it's clean because it doesn't get debris from outside blown in from vents we would otherwise have in a regular crawl space.  Recently, we had a semi-annual maintenance service done on our HVAC systems and when we opened the internal door to the crawl space, we noticed a smell.  And this wasn't the smell we now have in our closet.  This was a rodent-like, fecal-ish smell that made us fairly confident there were little critters in our crawl space.  Also, there was scat.

We had someone come and do two things at that point, first they swept out the debris all through the crawl space, much of which had been there since the house was constructed.  There was a question on if the scat was old or new, because it was quite hard and dry, said the main from our insect treatment company.  He also said that keeping out small mice is a very difficult proposition because they can wiggle through extremely small spaces. 

But we wanted to make some sort of an effort to make it more difficult.  As they were sweeping out the debris, they went around with spray foam and sealed up any small holes in the perimeter.  And that went smoothly and we hoped the problem was over. 

The thing is, they may have done a very good job, thus trapping a small animal in the crawl space.  And it died.   It may have died in the wall between the floor and the basement, but wherever it died, we can't see it or get to it.  We can't really hone in on it other than the smell is strongest near the closet under the stairs.  So, other than tearing up walls, we're going to have to wait for it to decompose and dessicate at which point the smell will fade. 

Today is day four of the smelly closet and it is the best and least-stinky day yet.   Hopefully that will be the last of the crawl space critter situation.  We shall see.

The Big Boy Update:  "There's the Christmas man."  My son told daddy this the other night as he saw some Christmas decorations that included a Santa.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Hair spray.  Okay, this hair thing is getting out of control.  Her hair is so thin and fine that we want to keep what we can of it.  She doesn't mind bows, but if they annoy her, she'll pull them out.  Also, she rolls around so much that they sometimes just fall out on their own, taking strands of hair with them.  She doesn't need anything, other than her hair is in her eyes.  So today, I implemented, "operation hair spray".  If we can spray it back for a while, just until it's long enough to get fully into a band, we'll be making progress.  

Fitness Update: Non-stop cardio and core day at the gym.  Our trainer was laughing at us as we were all failing at simple things that, done individually, should have been easy, but when it's the twenty-third thing you've done without stopping, makes you look like a wimp.

One Foot, Two Foot, Sock Foot, Shoe Foot

Do you remember being a child and having one shoe come untied and after a while you just kicked it off?  Maybe you didn't feel like re-tying it or it was just nice to have it off for a while.   And yet your other shoe was on, but that didn't seem to matter.

It was an interesting sensation, having one foot taller with the shoe than the socked foot.  It was a strange feeling to walk around off-set in height.  It was also, in a strange way, fun.   I remember one time walking around for hours with just one shoe on many years ago.

My children don't seem to care if they have both, one or no shoes on.  Last night I took one shoe off to get something out, like a pebble, and I had to go take care of some child thing immediately, so I launched into action with only one shoe.    It took me several minutes to get back to my shoe, but it reminded me of my childhood.

Was it a novel feeling?  No.  Was it interesting enough to not bother putting the other shoe back on.  Definitely not.  I felt awkward and just wanted to get back to the missing shoe so I could get some foot-based sameness back in my life. 

Children are so flexible mentally.  Everything is new and everything is interesting.  Once we get old it's all about what we know is what we like and everything else has got to go.

The Big Boy Update:  "Papa, turn on the dark."  Nana brought flashlights for the children to play with in their tent today.  My son wanted to see what they looked like, but it wasn't even remotely close to being night time.  After a few minutes he turned to Papa and said, "Papa, turn on the dark."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  The cutest grocery shopper.  My daughter went to the grocery store with me this morning.  For the first time, she pushed around the little children's cart.  She followed me everywhere through the store with adults smiling and commenting all along the way.  She helped put canned goods into the cart and on the next aisle, she decided to select a bag of sugar and then two bags of coconut to put in her cart that I put back when she wasn't looking.   She presented the cashier with our card at checkout and then she put her cart back in the cart area as we got ready to leave the store.   It was, without a doubt, one of those, "cutest kid ever" moments.