Noble Dead Coffee Talk

I'm close to joining the land of the living again, and getting back to making more regular posts and chatting with people.

But JC and I just had a strange experience and it's on my mind. Our little town has several grocery stores--bottom of the line being Winco and top of the line being a store called "Roth's."

All the stores put out little advertisements, and this week, Roth's is running a truly good deal on meat. They're doing a special sale of "Mix and Match," where they're putting wrapped trays of different types of meat into a refrigerator case and people can choose five packages of anything for a total of nineteen dollars: steak or roasts or pork chops or chicken thighs or chicken wings or Italian sausages or 2lb packs of bacon. And the trays are generous. JC and don't always cook with meat. We do vegetarian about half the time, but this sounded like a good deal to us--and it was.

But when we arrived at the store, there were people lined up all around the case, and they were taking out packages almost as fast as the employees could prep them and put them in.

Everybody was very polite, but it was clear that a lot of people wanted to stock up on this meat being sold for five good-sized packages for nineteen dollars. We waited our turn and then we waited for the employees to catch up. But I was a little taken back by the size of the "turn out" for this event.

Oddly enough, Oregon can feel colder--much colder--than Colorado. I did not expect this.

Last winter JC and I had few rather uncomfortable months. Any of my Oregon or Washington friends can clearly remember the three-week freak snow storm over last year's winter holidays.

We hit the fabulous low of seven degrees outside for nearly a week.

In Oregon.

Seven degrees.

JC and I have a little "heat pump" out back and this thing is awesome. It uses very little power and usually keeps the house quite comfortable, but it's designed for a climate where the normal winter temperature only drops to about 38 to 44 degrees. As many, many people have noticed, weather patterns are drastically changing.

It just could not handle seven degrees, and we were lucky if we could keep the interior temp here up to 59--it was often lower. We were cold.

So, JC and I looked at our budget, and did a little restructuring, and we used a portion of a recent signing advance to have an Enviro Wood Stove inserted into our brick fireplace. We've had it less than a week, and I think I am in love. For the first hour or so, the little stove puts our less heat then our fireplace did . . . but then . . . oh my gosh. After it creates a seal and starts turning the logs to embers, this lovely thing starts pumping out heat from a single good-sized piece of wood that will last for hours. It is amazing.

It is toasty warm in our house right now. Any of you who remember us taking down that oak tree last year know we have at least four year's worth of firewood stacked outside.

Oak needs at least one more year to season, so we're using some other wood now . . . but we should be well set and not freeze our bottoms in the winter now.

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