Journal: The More It Snows, Tiddly-Pom ♫ ♪

 

By noon on Tuesday, weather advisories around our area had expired after our 13” snowfall and high winds Monday, and the sun was shining brightly on all the sparkling snow.  But many roads were still closed, including part of I80.  The wind was blowing hard enough that I could not see the highway down the hill a quarter of a mile or so.  It was 20° with a windchill of -6°, what with the steady 20 mph wind and gusts up to 40 mph.

Larry had been out until about 3:30 a.m. that morning helping a friend and coworker get his snowblade and pickup working.  The roads were covered with ice, and there were drifts atop the ice.  It was going to be getting even colder; we were receiving warning of coming temps that would be well below zero through the remainder of the week.

I spent the day sewing.

When Larry got home, he fiddled around with something on the washing machine, bypassing the lock and convincing it that the lock was, in fact, working, when, in fact, it was not.

I happily went to wash clothes.

The washing machine wouldn’t put water into the machine.

Larry went back to the laundry room, did a bit more fiddling, and eventually got the machine to add water.

Naïve and optimistic soul that I am, I once again figured all was well.

All was not well, however.

Two hours later, I belatedly realized that the machine was stuck on spin, with 35 minutes to go.  Furthermore, it was not a fast spin, certainly not fast enough to get much water out of the clothes.  I tried various things to make it continue, but the recalcitrant thing ignored me, quite pointedly, I thought.

I finally canceled the cycle and put it on Drain & Spin.

It politely Drained & Spun – but not as fast as usual.

I went through this same sequence for the next five or six loads of clothes, though I remembered to set a timer and switch to Drain & Spin sooner rather than later.  Twice, the machine decided to continue through all the cycles and not stall out.  But only twice, and even then, the clothes were much too wet at the end.

What a pain that was.  I tried three, maybe four, different settings, but the same thing happened each time.  The spin cycle never got up to the proper speed.  But we limped along, machine and me, getting the clothes washed despite the malfunction.

I wrote to the company who holds our warranty, SquareTrade, and requested a new lock.  They sent one promptly, and it arrived in two days.  The delivery trucks did well, dodging snowstorms!  Larry has yet to install the new lock.  Perhaps that will solve the issues, but I’m not really very hopeful.

This was the view from my east sewing room window Tuesday afternoon.

By bedtime, I had finished all the Log Cabin blocks for Trevor’s Nine Puppies quilt.  There were only two more to do for the matching pillow.  (The blocks are not yet sewn together in this picture.)

A friend was telling about her kitty:  “Shadow came into my sewing room and spent a good hour or so in there sleeping in a basket I got out for him.  Then at an unexpected moment he attacked my foot.  Silly cat.”

When I was little, I had a Siamese cat whom I named Purr-Purr.  That cat used to hide somewhere in the living room – we couldn’t figure out where – and wait for my father to pass through, because it was so utterly satisfying to surprise him.

Daddy would walk through the living room, looking nervously from one side to the other, knowing That Cat was somewhere around.  He’d hurry through, hair standing up on end, knowing what was going to happen, any minute now...

Purr-Purr would wait till Daddy was alllllmost out of the room, starting to relax and thinking, Guess I was wrong; the cat isn’t in here – and then, ka-BLOOEY!!!  Purr-Purr would hit him at the top of his leg, slide all the way to his ankle, and then spring away and disappear without a trace while Daddy was still yelling and running wildly in midair some three feet above the floor.

Here I am on my sixth birthday, October 6, 1966, holding Purr-Purr.  That kitty liked me to carry him around upside down, all cuddled in my arms, with his feet sticking up limply.  His eyes would be half shut, and he’d purr loudly enough to vibrate my entire body.

At a quarter ’til three Wednesday afternoon, I looked out the window and discovered that it was snowing hard.  

I finished putting together the last two Log Cabin blocks for Trevor’s pillow.  They still needed a border, but I would put that on at the same time I put a border on the quilt top.

And then it was time for church.  I dressed in a plaid wool skirt, a turtleneck, and a cardigan, and pulled out my warmest wool dress coat.  It’s a long, swing style in dark forest green, with forest green fox fur around the hood.

Sometimes on cold days, it’s surprising how few coats there are in the church coatroom.  That’s because people go from warm house to warm car in attached garage, and, after a short trip to the church, husbands deliver wives and children right to the doors.  I do hope they have warm coats in their vehicles, though, in case of an accident, or in case a car stalls out!

Speaking of coats, right before the Christmas program, I went into the coatroom to hang my coat, pulled one of the nice wooden hangers off the rack, started to put my coat on it – and it broke in half, right in my hand. 

I turned, looking for a place to put the broken hanger – and in walked a friend, Joshua, with his three boys.  I held out the hanger, both parts of it, and said with a friendly smile, “You need a hanger?”

He, always gentlemanly to me, smiled and said in his polite way, “Yes, I do!  Thank you!” 

His oldest son saw what I was up to before his father realized anything was wrong with that hanger, and was grinning from ear to ear.  The younger boy then saw it, too.

I handed the thing to Joshua, and he had it in his hand before he noticed that it was in two pieces, and then he started laughing.  All three boys were laughing by then, too.

It’s always fun when small shenanigans just present themselves like that, and I don’t have to think anything up at all.

Thursday, weathermen began giving dire warnings of more snow and very cold weather.  Blizzard weather would start that night and last for a day or two, and there would be 20 below 0 temps with windchills possibly down to -50° Saturday night.

After scrubbing and polishing the bathroom and getting the kitchen clean enough that it could politely wait for deeper cleaning, I ate a toasted bagel slathered with butter, peanut butter, and honey and headed upstairs to sew.

I spent the day sewing the blocks for the Nine Puppies quilt into rows.  Once they were together, I had a whole lot of paper to remove from the back.  I used newsprint, which is a lot easier to remove than if it was regular typing paper.

The bird feeders were running low on seed, and I didn’t very much want to go outside to refill them.  Why aren’t all those feeders on a long cable connected to a pulley with a nice big handle for cranking them right up to the back patio door??

An Amazon delivery arrived containing cleaning supplies I’d ordered:  Swiffer refills for mops and dusters, etc., and a pack of three jars of lavender Fresh Wave (plant-based odor-removing gel).  Mmmmm... it smells really good.  Ever notice how some lavenders are baaaad?  There are a few good ones, though: Mrs. Meyer’s lavender scent is the best I’ve ever used (all-purpose cleaner, hand soap, dish soap, etc.), but this Fresh Wave definitely runs it a close race.  I got these little jars for our closet, which sometimes gets a little stale-smelling, probably from the old plaster walls and the old wood shelves in there.

After opening and putting a little jar on a closet shelf, I traded a tall armload of summer/autumn clothes on the shelves that fill one end of the closet with an armload of winter clothes in drawers upstairs in the little library.  It’s time, don’t you think?

Can you tell these Blue jays were ‘having words’?  They’re pretty birds, but they’re sure feisty.

My mother used to keep a can with a small chain in it to rattle at the Blue jays that would try to steal eggs or even baby birds from her wren house. One time, a particularly bold Blue jay just wouldn’t leave, and Mama threw the entire can at him!  Mama was somewhere around 80 at the time, but she was still a sure shot.  😄  The Blue jay steered clear of her, after that.

By 6:00 p.m., the snow had begun and the wind was picking up, already blowing at 40 mph.  It was 6°, and felt like -29°.

I put pork ribs in the Instant Pot, cooked some corn, and baked blueberry muffins.

Just as everything was done and ready to eat, Larry texted me:  “I am at the shop putting a voltage regulator on José’s plow truck.”

This is par for the course.  If I neglect to fix supper in a timely fashion, Larry will come home at an unusually decent hour.  If I make an extra-yummy supper, he will be late, later, or very late.

I extracted my helping of ribs from the pot, replaced the lid, and pressed ‘Keep Warm’.

At twenty after nine, I asked Larry, “Should I put your food in the refrigerator?”

“Yes, please!” he answered.  “I will be there around 10:00.”

“Then I’ll leave it in the Instant Pot on Warm,” I decided.  “It’s pork ribs,” I told him, “and they are really, really good.  If you rewarm them in the microwave, they won’t be as good.”

But he didn’t get home at 10:00.  I finally remembered the ribs, removed the pot from the cooker, and covered and put it in the refrigerator around 11:00 p.m.  

Larry got home well after midnight, half starved half to death.  He warmed his food in the microwave.  As predicted, the ribs were not nearly so good as they had been.

At 2:30 a.m., it was 3° with a windchill of -36°.  Snow was coming down, and it sounded like a hurricane howling around the eaves out there.

Friday at noon was the Senior Dinner at school – that’s not ‘seniors’ as in ‘elderly people’, that’s ‘seniors’ as in ‘kids who are in 12^th grade, and graduating’!  Two of our grandchildren, Emma (Teddy and Amy’s 2^nd child) and Nathanael (Bobby and Hannah’s 3^rd child), were graduating, and we were invited to the dinner.

Here’s a Harris’ sparrow on our back deck scratching up a spray of snow, looking for seeds.  The Harris’ is the largest sparrow in North America.  It breeds only in the Northwest Territories, and may migrate 3,500 miles.  The Harris’ sparrow was named after Edward Harris, a friend of John J. Audubon, who collected a specimen in 1843.  Audubon eagerly named the specimen thinking he was the first person to do so.  Little did he know that Thomas Nuttall collected the bird first in 1834 and named it ‘Mourning Finch’.

We had about 8” of snow by morning on top of the 13” we’d gotten Monday, and winds were gusting at 50+ mph.  We live 7 miles west of Columbus, on a little gravel lane that connects Old Highway 81, an old part of the road which is now only connected to Rte. 22 at one end, and about a mile long.  It is not a priority for the state to keep clear, though they do a pretty good job for the few of us who live along the road.  But sometimes we can only get out if residents clear lanes and roads themselves.  Even if we can get to Rte. 22, and then proceed on to Highway 81, a mile to the east, it might be rough going.  We have vehicles that can get through the drifts and cope with ice; but I don’t go places if I cannot see where I’m going!

I started getting ready, just in case we would go to the Senior Dinner.  Larry shoveled out the BMW and headed off somewhere; weather like this always makes him feel like he absolutely must go somewhere and do something.  😅🙄

During the night I had acquired a headache and earaches.  (Shouldn’t it have been Larry, and not me, acquiring such things?!)  At 10:30 a.m. it was 2°, with a windchill of -35°, and still snowing.  

Kindergarten through 6^th grade was canceled at our school, but the dinner was still on.  The food had already been purchased and was being prepared, after all; plus, Charles and Susan’s son Nathan was one of the seniors, and if the dinner was postponed, they would be unable to attend, since Charles and Susan are planning to head back to Scottsdale, Arizona, for further treatment of Susan’s cancer.

We have many friends in construction with big equipment capable of clearing just about anything.  They were busy on parking lots and streets that morning, and even came out and cleared Teddy’s road all the way to his house.  Ethan, 19, then made several trips to town with his pickup, delivering KST (Kids ’n Stuff ’n Things).

Larry called a little after 11:00 to let me know he was helping friends move snow, and doing his best to keep their blades and vehicles running.  He didn’t really want to quit and come home, and I didn’t really want to go out; so we decided to skip the dinner. 

That afternoon, Nathanael and Joanna both sent me pictures from the dinner.  You can see that a lot of people braved the cold and the snow to attend the dinner.  ’Course, almost all of them live in town, too.

However, one of the seniors and his parents, who live a few miles north of town, were snowed in thoroughly enough that even our friends with their large equipment couldn’t clear a path for them to get out.

Nathanael sent me a picture of himself holding a monkey his older sister Joanna gave him. 

We began hearing news of semis stuck on various highways, sometimes side by side, so no one could get around them, including snowplows.  Others stalled out because their fuel gelled.  In the space of two days, the State Patrol would make well over 1,000 vehicular assists.

On the four-lane east of Columbus, the west-going lane had a couple feet of snow drifted over it, while the right side of the east-going lane had several inches of snow.  However, the left lane was passable, just barely, and several westbound semis made it over into that eastbound lane and thus managed to get to town.

Late Friday night, I pulled the last piece of paper from the Log Cabin blocks.  All 42 of them were paper-free.  My fingertips were sore from that exercise!

Saturday, even had I wanted to go visit Loren in the cold and the wind and the snow, I could not have gotten there.  Just look at this map from the Nebraska 511 Travel Information website.  I’ve never, ever seen so many roads closed, all at once.  Snowplows were trying, but they just couldn’t keep up.

Last week when I visited Loren, I showed him this funny picture of Aaron bedecked with a piece of Hester’s Christmas decorations.  Loren really laughed over it. 

“Can you tell who’s in the background?” I asked.

“Sure!” he said.  “That’s Bobby!”  He looked at the picture a little while, then said, “He used to come to our house fairly often.”  He pondered the picture, then added, “He’d come in the evenings and visit for a while, back before we moved.” 

I was quite surprised.  That’s the first time Loren has ever mentioned anything from that era, to me, at least. 

“Yes, I remember,” I agreed. 

That was when Larry, Teddy, and Bobby were taking turns staying with Loren, during those last two months before we found a nursing home for him.  We could not leave him alone, for fear that he would wander off.

Loren smiled at me.  “Bobby really enjoyed that!”

Well, he had the first part right, I thought to myself.  😆  It wasn’t all that enjoyable for Bobby, especially when Loren wanted him to go home now, and Bobby of course wouldn’t, and Loren called him a ‘ramrod’ and informed him angrily, “I won’t have a young kid telling me how to live my life!”  Ugh, I’m glad those days are over and done with.

He remembered, “Bobby had a... ”  He made the shape of a rectangle, looked at me questioningly.  “He brought it with him,” he said.

I suggested, “Computer?” thinking he would know that word, but maybe not the word ‘laptop’.

Loren shook his head.  “No, but it was on that order...”  He again made a rectangular shape with his hands.

“Laptop?” I said.

“Yes!” Loren nodded happily.  “That’s what it was.  And he was working on...”  Again he looked at me, hoping I would know.

“Music?” I asked.

“Yes!!!” said Loren.  “He likes to do that!”

Saturday was Joanna’s 21^st birthday.  I got gifts and cards ready for her, for Emma, and for Nathanael – and they are all still sitting on my table, waiting for me to take them to their intended recipients next time I go to town.

“We DO have a gift for you!” I told Joanna yesterday.  “We’ll get it to you by next summer, at the latest.”  😄

A Cooper’s hawk swooped into the back yard and plucked off a ... ? bird? rabbit?  I couldn’t tell, as the windows had a thin, shiny layer of ice and frost on them.  

A little female house finch landed on the windowsill in the bathroom, having found a small stream of escaping warmth, as I had the window cracked open just a bit.  I always get hot when I blow-dry my hair.

Later, when I needed to close the window, the finch had cuddled her way under the window frame enough that I could not close it without injuring her.  So I opened the window, holding my hand in place to keep the bird from startling straight into the bathroom.  Then I gently lifted her up onto the snow piled around the windowsill, and she, after a reproachful look (“I was comfy!”), flew over to the bird feeders.

By noon, it had ‘warmed up’ to -10°, and felt like -41°.  This photo was taken near the town of Hebron and posted on a Facebook weather and road conditions group.

This picture was posted by the Nebraska Department of Transportation.  It certainly doesn’t look like it, but that’s Highway 81, a four-lane highway.  Looks like one might be better off just driving in the fields.

There were 370 NDOT snowplows active on Saturday in eastern Nebraska alone.  Over 1,000 motorists were stranded from both storms.  Over 15% of state roads (1,700 miles of roads) were closed.

That day, I sewed the rows of blocks for the Nine Puppies quilt together, and then added borders to the quilt top and to the two blocks for the pillow.  Now to find a backing for it.

As I mentioned last week, we’d been worrying that Victoria’s baby would decide to make an appearance in the middle of one of these blizzards.  Kurt and Victoria kept a close watch on the road situation, and Saturday afternoon immediately after Highway 81 was re-plowed, they headed to Norfolk, where her doctor is, and where the hospital is where they plan to have the baby.  They drove slowly and carefully, and a couple of hours later, Kurt texted Larry to let him know that they were in Norfolk and had checked into a motel, where they would stay until the baby arrived or the weather improved, whichever came first.

Speaking of babies born during blizzards, Larry’s father Lyle was born on January 8, 1936, during a snowstorm in Porter, Minnesota – and he weighed only 4 pounds!  They went for the doctor with horse and sleigh.  Baby arrived before the doctor did.

Our roads and lanes out here keep drifting over.  Larry got stuck a couple of times trying to push snow, and then his pickup quit.  One of the neighbor men helped him – and then the belt came off of his pickup.  Larry finally got his truck going again.  Brett parked his pickup in our drive and Larry hooked his charger to it, as the battery was going dead.  Then, while Brett walked to his house, about a block away, Larry went to town, picked up a new belt for Brett’s pickup, and came back with Walkers’ payloader and used it to clear our lanes, both to the north and to the south of our house, and on over to Brett’s house.  The payloader can move a lot more snow than a blade on a pickup.

After taking the payloader back to Walkers’, Larry helped some friends move snow, then worked on one of their plows.  He didn’t get home until 12:30 a.m. – and the lane was already starting to drift shut again.

Sunday, we decided it would be best to stay home.  The Mercedes was in a big snowdrift.  The BMW has a leak somewhere and the interior smells like gas.  The lane was drifted over again.

When I texted the kids to let them know where we were, I learned that Teddy and Amy and their family were snowed in, too, and so were Jeremy and Lydia and their family.

Teddy and Amy have quite a few animals – cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, geese, dogs (big Anatolian shepherds) and cats.  We always worry about them in this kind of weather.

Teddy called and told me about trying to move his cows to an area that wasn’t so deep in snow.  He dragged a sled with corn on it through the pasture, creating a path the cows could follow.  Some did, but he had to pull one reluctant cow along by her halter.  As soon as a couple of the bigger cows figured out where Teddy was leading them, they went plowing ahead through the snow that was halfway to the tops of their backs, and then the cow he was tugging on decided to go floundering after them.

Here’s the drift, along with piled snow from a snowplow, behind Jeremy’s pickup.  You can’t really tell it in the picture, but that snow is well over four feet high.  The mailbox is totally covered.

“Are you snowed in, too?” I asked Caleb.

“No,” he said.  “The grader came through yesterday afternoon.”

“Well, don’t let it make you all privileged and conceited and stuff,” I retorted.

“Too late, I’m afraid,” he replied.  😄

He then sent this picture of their big dog Marley atop a drift behind their house.  All that snow makes the house look low and squat. 

“That’s a lot of snow!” I wrote back.  “Does he like it?”

“Yep,” answered Caleb.  “Doesn’t seem to faze him at all.”

“Do you remember how Aleutia (our Siberian husky) would go loping through the snow with her head down in it, pretending she was a bulldozer?” I asked.  “Poor doggy ran her nose into the screw-down for the swing set and made it bleed.  Twice!”

“I don’t,” he replied.  “But Marley does the same thing.”

“Aleutia’s nose had a pinkish spot on it, the rest of her life,” I said.  “She’d come running and lean on me for comfort after hurting her nose – and cover me with snow.”

Hester said there were a lot of people missing from church that morning, though a few who live some distance out of town and had been well snowed in were there, because, said she, “they have access to the Big Scooping Vehicles.” 

Hee hee  She has made us laugh with her funny remarks since she was wee little.

Hannah, too, stayed home from church, as she is having a lot of trouble with asthma, and the cold weather makes it much worse.  She is wondering if she has pneumonia again.  We worry about her.

At noon, it was -12° – and that was the high temperature for the day.  However, the wind had died down a little, so the ‘Real Feel’ temperature had risen from -47° earlier that morning to -27°.

We were recently remembering the time my late nephew David, at about age 3 ½, was pretending to teach Sunday School to his brothers, one older, and one younger.  He flipped pages in his little New Testament and said, “Everybody turn to ---” and he proceeded to name the exact book and chapter his parents’ Sunday School teacher had been teaching from for a few Sundays.

Proceeding on with the ‘lesson’, he thumped on the box he was using as his pulpit and extorted his young audience, “You need to stop ah dis wickedness, obey your parents, and TIE YOUR SHOES!!!”  😂

Larry made us his Supah-Dupah Waffles that morning.  We weren’t quite done eating when some friends called, asking him for help with a Suburban with a snowblade on it that was buried in snow and might or might not start (it wouldn’t, Larry would discover when he got there).  So he finished eating, dug the BMW out of a new drift, and went to help.

Later, he reported that the gas smell inside the BMW has worsened.  If he can smell it, and more, if he complains about it, it must be bad indeed.

There’s a drift covering our back deck that’s nearly up to our hips.  Larry scooped a path to the bird feeders when he got home last night – and he brought me two nifty new bird feeders from Menards, too, since he had to go there to get a new battery for the aforementioned Suburban.

At one point during his snow-pushing, he went to the closest convenience store for gas.  He went inside to buy himself a carton of grapes and some cheese.  He was dressed in his snowclothes (should be one word) – and belatedly realized he had forgotten to remove wallet from pants pocket and put it in outer snowclothes (still should be one word) pocket.  So he had a lot of gyroscoping to do, in order to reach his wallet. 😅

By 1:00 p.m. today, it had warmed up to -1°, but the windchill was -33°.  I donned coat, boots, and gloves, and went out to hang my new bird feeders and fill a couple of others.  Whew, I nearly froze to death!  

I brought two of the feeders inside, as they were frozen solid, and no birdseed could flow through the ports.  Little birds were landing right on the feeders while I filled and hung them!  There were Chipping sparrows out there, the ones with the little rust-colored caps, making three kinds of sparrows at the feeders all at once, including the Harris’ and the English sparrows.  There were Blue jays, house finches, goldfinches, Red-bellied and Downy woodpeckers, and Dark-eyed juncos, both the Slate-colored and the Pink-sided migrant varieties.  The Pinks are somewhat rare here, coming from the Rockies.  The Slates come from Northern Canada.  Here’s a Red-bellied woodpecker.  They’re a good two inches bigger than the Downies.

Isn’t it amazing, how the birds survive this weather?  The temperatures have been far below zero, with windchills down to -50°!  Yet they survive.

The suet is frozen solid.  Blue jays and woodpeckers have been pecking away at it, but they have to pound awfully hard to get even small bits loose.

Another little house finch, this one a male, discovered the warmth on the sill of the bathroom window this morning.  He looked around to assure himself he was safe, then tucked his little head under a wing and took a 15-minute nap.

Larry came home for a few minutes this afternoon to bring me some milk.  The only kind he could find was Fairlife lactose-free, 2%.  I don’t need lactose-free; but there’s hardly any milk in town, since milk trucks have been unable to travel in much of the state.  Many roads are still closed and drifted shut.  The milk is fine; it tastes good.  There are only 52 ounces in this jug – less than half a gallon.  I’d better be careful with it!

This picture was taken by a local meteorologist on Highway 6 between Milford and Lincoln.

Tonight Larry installed the new latch on the washing machine.  I started a load of clothes, hoping – but not expecting – all the glitches to be ironed out.

They are not.  The washer got stuck on a slow spin at 37 minutes, just like it’s been doing.  I had to cancel the cycle and restart it on Drain & Spin.

Siggghhhh...  But at least a large load of Larry’s work clothes is now washed, dried, folded, and put away.

Tomorrow I’ll wash towels and linens.  When the washer stalls at 37 minutes, spinning slowly, I’ll try to be thankful that I don’t have to do clothes on a washboard.

And I’ll write another email to SquareTrade and tell them about the glitch.

Bedtime!

 

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn          ,,,>^..^<,,,

P.S.:  Newsflash!  Newsflash! 

 

Kurt and Victoria have a new baby (as opposed to an old one)!

It’s a boy, born at 9:27 p.m., and his name is Arnold (Larry’s middle name) Ray (Larry’s late father Lyle’s middle name).  They plan to call him ‘Arnie’.  He weighs 8 pounds, 3 ounces.  Mother and baby are doing well.

This, after they decided the weather had improved enough that they could safely come back home from Norfolk today.

They were only home for... 30 minutes?  An hour? – when they were abruptly made aware that they should head back to Norfolk, straight away!

We are thankful they are safe, and all is well.

We now have 28 grandchildren.