Hydro Sends a Contract

I turned the heat on yesterday. Suddenly I noticed that I felt chilled, and there is no sense in feeling chilled unless one has to. I do not have to. The heat pump took several hours to bring the house up to 22.5C, which is a comfortable temperature for us.

Last fall the heat was turned on, on the first of November, so this year it is turned on two weeks earlier than last. I attribute this to Covid. The recovery is slow, very slow, and although I no longer feel polluted, I am definitely not back to my previous energy levels and robustness. Feeling chilled at this time would be unwise, I deem this no time to push the limits of comfort with the indoor temperature.

With our Covid recovery, the tiredness, and the cough persist. Tomorrow it will have been three weeks since my first symptoms appeared. I notice too that suddenly a lymph node is sore and swollen, which will be checked out with the Nurse Practitioner.

The much anticipated contract from Hydro arrived on Monday. I knew it was coming, I wanted it to arrive, I pursued its arrival, and have been waiting anxiously since mid-July for it. So to my surprise it threw me for a loop when it got here. First was the sticker shock, the fee for work was over two thousand dollars, ouch, ouch, ouch. Second, the contract was scary complicated, and I couldn’t understand a great deal of it. To my surprise, I was totally overwhelmed for the first while. I imagine the Covid recovery process wasn’t helping me cope. I was so stressed my nose started to bleed, always a sign that I need to step back from a situation.

However, within a short time my feet found firm ground, and I began to deal with what I needed to do. The electrician was contacted, and the furnace installation people as well. Thankfully the electrician called me yesterday morning, arranged for a visit, visited, reviewed the contract, advised me of the parts I needed to understand, and assured me that his estimate remained unchanged. So it was a go.

I did all the administrative things, signed the contract paperwork, submitted it, paid the fee, ensured that the electrician’s name was included in the “paperwork” so that the project could proceed, and sent the electrician the technical specs for the job. And now we wait until the hydro people schedule the upgrade with the electrician, which is a big deal with a new transformer, and a lot of other work on hydro’s part. On the day of the work the house will be without hydro for the day, and if it is cold that day, it may be the day I fire up the wood stove for the first time.

I was surprised and pleased to find that Ginger was not thrown by having a visitor to the house. When we first met Ginger, he ran away and hid when we entered the room, he would not come out. So it was a pleasant surprise when he regarded the visiting electrician with curiosity, inspecting his boots by the door, then sitting calmly observing everything that was going on. Ginger has settled into the household as reigning monarch.

Last weekend we closed up the Camp for the winter, securing Grace the trailer, setting the winter mouse traps, and putting everything in order on the grounds. We packed up the bedding and fabrics to bring home. It was a beautiful day, so lovely to sit in the sunshine and watch the last of the yellow leaves flutter and flash in the breeze.

The canning season has wound down, although there are still a few sessions to go when the cabbage and the last of the peppers are brought in. That won’t be a lot of work. The tomatoes have gone into the freezer as they have ripened, so processing them can wait until the heating system has been sorted, and we are both feeling better.

One new project I have taken on this week has been to make our own laundry detergent. This is a new process to me. I purchased the ingredients last summer for this project, and finally got to it yesterday. On Monday the very last dregs of the laundry detergent we had purchased were used up. I don’t like doing things at the last minute, and this was definitely a last minute project. I used an online recipe for this laundry soap, and it was very easy. I made it on Monday, yesterday I stirred it, and today I hope to transfer it from the five gallon bucket to plastic jugs for storage. The recipe makes five gallons of laundry detergent, which will last a long time using 1/4 cup per load. We haven’t tried it yet, I do hope we like it!

This weekend I plan on making sausage patties, and milling whole wheat flour. Attila will be closing down much of the garden, composting plants, emptying rain barrels and storing them for the winter, splitting fire wood, that sort of thing.

I’ve been experimenting with muffins, using my basic recipe to create different flavour combinations, using the ingredients we have on hand. Two that we really love are the Ginger Apple, and the Pineapple Coconut Lemon Muffins. The ginger used for the muffins is the diced ginger left over from making my ginger tea, which I candy for baking. The “pineapple” in the Pineapple Coconut Muffins is the Zucchini Pineapple I canned, and the lemon is the lemon zest garnered from the lemons when making fresh lemon juice, which we now must do because we can no longer access lemon juice with no preservatives added. I find it relaxing and fun to find ways to use as much of what we have as possible, in ways that we enjoy.

And so Covid recovery continues, and the familiar flow of life around here is slowly resuming.

Worldly

Weather

Updated on Wed, Oct 19, 6:25 AM
3 °C
FEELS LIKE 3
Overcast
Wind 2 SE km/h
Humidity 92 %
Visibility 17 km
Sunrise 7:27 AM
Wind gust 3 km/h
Pressure 100.4 kPa
Ceiling 9100 m
Sunset 6:17 PM

Quote

“What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but restless mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.”
Charles Victor Cherbuliez
1829 – 1899

Words to live by.