You are probably wondering, “Why did she post a picture of a propane truck? And why does she think that’s beautiful?” Well, it just goes to show you, beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Last week, this is what The Good Old Days Farm looked like:
Above is the front yard. Here is a picture of one of the gardens:
Ugh! Now, you might think it’s pretty. Or, if you live somewhere cold you might this “little bit” of snow is no big deal. But I grew up in Canada. I lived there for 24 years. I’ve done my time. I did not move to Texas so that I could see snow. In fact, I lived in Guyana (South America) for a year and I’m pretty sure that the Garden of Eden had Guyanese weather. Ice, cold and snow – I am convinced – is a product of sin and not part of God’s original plan. That’s my personal theory on the matter. (And come on… even you people who live in cold places and claim to like it and want to argue with me about this… when you imagine yourself in heaven, do you picture yourself all bundled up in a snowsuit? I think not.)
The Little Farmhands love snow! Perhaps they like it so much because they only see it for 2 or 3 days a year. They were born here in Texas. And since snow is such a rarity here, I allowed them a special treat! Maple Syrup Snow!
The instructions are easy! Just boil maple syrup and pour it over the snow. (It works better if you’re outside where it’s cold. I’ve turned into a weather wimp and so we did it inside.)
The hot maple syrup instantly hardens into ooey-gooey deliciousness when it touches the snow.
Let’s just say the Little Farmhands liked it.
A lot.
Right in the middle of all this snow, we needed our propane tank filled up. To save you the gory details of a very long and complicated story, I called the propane company to schedule a refill and got lousy customer service and so we decided to switch propane companies. The new company we found is 69 cents/gallon cheaper than the old company, which works out to $172 in savings in just the first fill up. So we switched. The only catch was that the new company couldn’t come to install right away. We decided to wait for them.
So for a week and a half now, we’ve had no propane.
Fortunately it’s been cold, so we’ve had a fire going in the woodstove anyway. We put a huge pot of water on top the woodstove and let it heat up. That’s what we bathed the baby in. The rest of us used it too. We’ve been cooking the same way, perpetually making tea and soup on the top of the woodstove.
Doesn’t the soup look delicious:
Then, right in the middle of this, our pipes froze. So then I had no propane and no water. (Good thing the snow lasted for a week because I was melting it to make water.) That was one long, hard day.
Anyway, during the week and a half that we had no propane, everybody got tired of soup. One night we decided to do something different and we had baked potatoes! We wrapped the potatoes in aluminum foil and placed them in the fireplace directly on the coals where they baked. Mmmm! They were warm and tasted good, but all the ashes that got on the aluminum foil sure made a mess! A visitor dropped by while the mess was still all out on the table and she got a chuckle out of it. “Oh look! You’re camping!” she said.
Yes, it sure felt like camping! And like any other camping, it was fun while it lasted but now I’m glad to be home and back to normal life again!
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