A few more chuckles from our recent power outage during the storm.
When you live in Maine, you own lobster cooking pots.
And when the power is out for a day and a half due to a monster winter storm, you use your fireplace for heat. This burns copious amounts of wood, which results in copious amounts of ash. And when you can’t find your old ash bucket?
You improvise.
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With a lobster pot.
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Which worked remarkably well.
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Though I probably should have dug a little deeper in the closet for the larger one.
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And speaking of improvising…
The wire mesh curtain that slides across our fireplace is a wonderful thing. It keeps sparks and small pieces of wood from jumping out and burning down our house. In other words, it’s important.
Ours has always been temperamental and must be slid with care, something my husband naturally ignored. He tugged and pulled and ripped all day which resulted in half of the metal strip that holds the curtain in place to come crashing down.
His solution?
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I think you know me well enough to realize this will not be tolerated for long.
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will be other opportunities in the future. And if they auction off his old toothbrush you could always harvest a little DNA, grow a clone and start a billion dollar company in your own garage.
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#1?
The peanut butter cookie… to which I have but one word.
Blech!
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Foot Botox. Why can’t rich people just take a piece of sandpaper to their heels like the rest of us.
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I most definitely do not.
Nope. Not in the least.
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That’s a hat?
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I know there’s a lot of down time while on stakeout or speed trap duty…. but that seems a bit extreme.
We will start and end this post with photos of His Lordship.
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Seen here giving me the evil eye for lowering the blinds and blocking his morning sun.
I had a birthday recently… yay me, another trip around the sun and straight down the road to decrepitude.
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The husband told me to pick a place for dinner but I’d skipped lunch and decided we should go cocktail hopping early.
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Enter Royal River Grille, one of my favorite spots.
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We settled happily at the bar… but were presented with brunch menus since it was a Sunday. I’m not a breakfast person so the thought of scrambled eggs with my Cosmo at 4:00pm did not please me, not one little bit. Brunch until 5:00pm? Come on.
We decided to move on and got the check.
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With tip, $30.92 for a drink and a beer. What’s the world coming to?
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Next stop was Goodfire Brewery, a new place I’d been wanting to try. On arrival we discovered they were almost out of beer and only had three left on tap. Thankfully one was a blackberry currant sour, but at $9.50 per for the small pour and a virtually non existent menu, we paid $24 for two beers and moved on again.
We ended at a nice seafood place we hadn’t visited in a while and I had a lovely crab, shrimp and scallop lasagna which I didn’t photograph.
So we end with me another year older and a very innocent Lord Dudley Mountcatten.
Until I read this book I never gave much thought to inhaling space vomit, but trust me… NASA has.
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On that happy note much research has gone into vomit training and simulation.
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I’ve never eaten Progresso vegetable soup, and now? I’m quite sure I never will.
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There’s a job for which you will never see me volunteer.
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Since motion sickness is a natural response to a novel or sensorially perplexing motion or gravitational environment, astronauts have to go through it all over again when they return to Earth after a long mission. During the weeks or months of no gravity, their brains have been interpreting all otolith cues as acceleration in one direction or another. So when they move their head, their brain tells them they’re moving.
Astronaut Peggy Whitson described her first moments on Earth after coming back from 191 days on the International Space Station like this: “I stood up and the world was going around me at 17,500 miles per hour, as opposed to me going around the world at 17,500 miles per hour.” It’s called land- ing vertigo, or Earth sickness.
I’m sure I’m not the only who’ll be complaining today as it seems the entire United States was slammed by what they called a bomb cyclone event yesterday.
The wind? Insane. It gusted almost 70mph at our house.
The rain? A deluge that flooded roads, businesses, and homes.
Our nightmare started yesterday at 8:00am just as I was about to step into the shower. Bam! No power. Which meant no shower, sandwiches for lunch and dinner and an epic 13 hour gin rummy tournament by flashlight. Temperatures during the day were mild with a high of 52 degrees, but by nightfall it was frigid.
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Thankfully we have a fireplace…. and while it won’t heat the whole house, it did manage to keep the living room at 58 degrees when the outside temperature dropped to 7. Of course my husband the Marine runs the operation.
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Which means throwing giant logs on the top to get it truly blazing.
This does not always end well.
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Because sometimes the logs revolt and pop back out. Giant cloud of smoke, sparks that burned the carpet? You betcha!
But as we sat in the dark enjoying the smell of smoke and scorched Berber, the fun was just beginning. Yes, just as we were about to call it a day and go to bed… shingles started lifting and literally flying off the roof. We watched them sail into the backyard, the neighbor’s driveway and the road. Good times!
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Or not as it turns out.
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Five new leaks as of this morning.
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Did I mention Lord Dudley Mountcatten is utterly terrified of the fire? Positively and absolutely. He fled to the furthest reaches of our bedroom and cried nonstop. Which meant instead of sleeping on the relative warmth of the living room couch, I had to snuggle his highness in the frigid bedroom all night and got no sleep whatsoever because to top it all off? Our neighbor’s wood stove caught fire at midnight.
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Thankfully no one was hurt.
It’s 1:00pm now and we’ve been without power for 29 hours. I haven’t slept nor showered and just discovered it’s not easy to make tea and toast in a fireplace. I have to say …. I’m more than ready to fill the house with electric current. This pioneer woman thing is getting old.
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Here are a few pics I grabbed from friends.
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Our little downtown park.
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Not sure if you can tell, but the water is right under the bridge.
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Yikes!
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You’re looking at a pier and a parking lot. Or rather, you should be.
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We may be cold, dirty and hungry… but I’m still glad we don’t live there.
So many items popped into my head when I read this… but if I’m going to have to choose one:
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The milk box.
(No, I didn’t grow up in Palmyra, PA … but I couldn’t find an image of the dairy that provided our back porch with a milk delivery box so this will have to do.)
Young people today are amazed when you tell them a milkman actually came to your house twice a week and left the milk, cream, and butter you ordered in a zinc lined metal box. And while I admit I vaguely remember ours as the service ended when I was quite young… never running out of milk had to be the ultimate convenience. Some dairies left ice cream as well.
Now that’s a delivery I can totally get behind.
Your turn.
What item did you grow up with that no one sees anymore?
Yes, I’ve found another one of those quirky Mary Roach books to share with you. This time… we’re going to space.
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If you missed the last few books I shared, you should know Mary’s research tends to go a little beyond the norm and there will be some colorful as well as uncomfortable subjects discussed in future posts.
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“Early in my research, I came across a moment- forty minutes into the eighty-eighth hour of Gemini VII-which, for me, sums up the astronaut experience and why it fascinates me. Astronaut Jim Lovell is telling Mission Control about an image he has cap- tured on film. “a beautiful shot of a full Moon against the black sky and the strato formations of the clouds of the earth below.” reads the mission transcript. After a momentary silence, Lovell’s crewmate Frank Borman presses the TALK button. “Norman’s dumping urine. Urine [in] approximately one minute.” Two lines further along, we see Lovell saying, “What a sight to behold!” We don’t know what he’s referring to, but there’s a good chance it’s not the moon. According to more than one astronaut memoir, one of the most beautiful sights in space is that of a sun-illumined flurry of flash-frozen waste-water droplets. Space doesn’t just encompass the sublime and the ridiculous. It erases the line between.”
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Sun struck frozen pee.
And we’re off!
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For all the excitement of preparation and training, I can imagine there would also be a lot of mind numbing down time.
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Butt lubrication is probably not highlighted in the NASA press pamphlet.
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The lunar two step?
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Want to test how astronauts react to stress? No toilet would definitely do it.
River's world..... 