Rough start.

It is now ten days into the new year and for all intents and purposes, it's not going so well. For the last six days, we've been pretty much sidelined with a nasty stomach bug that is bringing life to a grinding halt when combined with a heat pump that doesn't want to work once the temperature outside drops below 30....and it's been below 25 for the last four days! We are more than just a little weary of wearing as many layers INside as we do outside, and it's not fun hanging out on a bathroom floor when the floor is 50 degrees.


BUT....this too shall pass. Eventually. Just another of those things we have to put up with as life goes on. The part to fix our heater will be in tomorrow (even if tomorrow it'll once again be above freezing outside) and hopefully this stomach bug will be gone SOON.


If nothing else, we've had a good opportunity to familiarize ourselves with how things work here in the winter. New house, new learning experiences. We know we definitely have to find a more effective way of heating the house than by a heat pump; it doesn't stay below freezing ALL winter long here, but when it does dip down that low, it's kind of important to have a method of heating the house that actually works. We are most certainly going to get the fireplace and chimney serviced so we can use it, and Pete wants to make it a pass-through fireplace (is that even possible??) so we can heat both the living room and the dining room. We are going to be redoing the floors in both bathrooms when the tax money comes in (yay, we qualify for the first-time homebuyers' tax credit by a technicality!) and we are thinking that electric radiant heating both in the bathrooms and in the kitchen would be an excellent way to warm three of the coldest rooms in the house. We'd love to convert the whole house to radiant heat....maybe one room a year? I'd hate to have to rip up the hardwood floors in the dining room and schoolroom, though.


We've also decided the last week or so that the bathroom remodel WILL include a new bathtub. To fill an entire bathtub with near-scalding hot water and have it be cool by the time one steps foot in the tub is not a good thing. Cast iron may hold heat well, but it also saps all the warmth from your bath!


OH well....we did at least get to enjoy a few days of snow here, and that's not a common occurance from what I understand. The girls have really enjoyed it, and I've had a blast watching the gorgeous birds that are darting around the property. There's just something about a cardinal in snow that makes you think God was an art lover! I've got a ton of pictures from our "snowstorm" (haahaaa....we've lived in upstate New York, and I assure you, we KNOW this was nowhere near a snowstorm), but I'll share my favorite with you. Jamie, still remembering the frozen-tongue scene from A Christmas Story a few weeks ago, wanted to see if a tongue would freeze to wood too. This child is going to be dangerous as she gets older, I think.