Again it's been months since last post. Oh well.
I was travelling - seems like my work is now flying, taking the train, training people, writing training materials... Over twenty years ago when I applied this job I honestly thought I wouldn't have to fly ever again. I hate flying (my father's a pilot). Yep. More flying this year.
But. Ys is doing fine with few tweaks of his medication, we'll have another appointment at the hospital soon. I don't think he'll need change in his meds now. But he's still growing, so it might happen at some point. Medication makes him tired, which is a but sad, he sleeps a lot. 14yr should be staying awake all night.
Christmas came and went, it was nice, we had the most beautiful tree with a LOT of decorations, I bought two huge tubes full of new baubles (they were half price!) because someone destroyed most baubles last year... Oh well.
It's 21 years since we lost our boys, and it still hurts like hell. I cried at their grave. Being the good mother I am I bought them both a bottle of hard booze - at 21 they would be able to buy it legally (so I bought them those tiny minibar bottles of vodka and brandy). I bet those bottles won't be there next time when I go to see my sons. And I'm quite sure it's not the squirrel who's taken the bottles...
But then. Electricity. Or more like THE PRICE. Because our northern location we need to have heating here, and unfortunately to us, our house is mostly heated with electricity. Of course I have my (four!) fireplaces, and by using them I have managed to cut our electricity usage by 46-48%. And we still pay 4 to 5x more on bill at the moment... And next bill will be about 10x higher than average electricity bill. We might get some reimbursement from government, but because we are "moderately well-off" and own our own house with reasonable mortage, we propably won't get much, if any.
Food prices... At least I know how to cook with cabbage, potatoes and swede. We've given up most fruits, it's apples and bananas and pears now. And vegetables - tomatoes and cucumbers are a rare treat! But on the other hand, they need tremendous amounts of energy to grow here, artificial light and heat, so it's not very sustainable to eat them in winter anyway. So more cabbages, carrots, swedes and beets. Yey.
I haven't used my electric stove at all since October. I've even baked cakes in my wood burning stove oven. I know why people were so eager to get rid of their wood burning stoves and turn to electricity after war - this is a slow method of making dinner. Oh no, the stove burns hot, it's not that. But to GET it burn hot I need to get firewood and get the fire started... With electric stove I just turn knob or two. And if I want to use oven, I need to plan ahead, because I'm using this brick monster, which needs to be heated 2-3 hours before I can put anything into the oven itself. (but after that I can cook a whole ham on turkey without adding any wood).
And because we have been using a lot of firewood - I mean A LOT, we were rapidly running out of it. Luckily Old Man has a mountain of dry wood in his "new" woodshed at the mansion - they are from the 90's or even before that, but the wood is bone dry and still burns hot. So we spent the whole Saturday (today) first getting those logs out of the shed. They were stacked so tightly that the whole stack stood firmly in place even after we managed to pry our a row of logs midway... I was thinking the shed would collapse after we remove some wood, but fortunately it still stood proudly when we left.
We emptied two rows/stacks of logs and filled a whole tractor trailer with them! So more than four cubic meters of dry ready-cut firewood.
It took 2 hours to fill the trailer, and four hours to empty it... But now all logs are neatly stacked again in OUR shed.
You know what they say about heating your house with wood? It warms you several times - first when you cut it in the forest, then when you cut and split it, third time when you stack it... Well, this load of firewood has been warming people five times already and it's not yet burning!
But this made me so happy - no matter if there is going to be power cut or not - we'll stay warm and cosy and we will get a hot meal every day.
I bet I'll be aching all over tomorrow. As well as boys, they worked very hard.
Off to sauna now!
