Living Large In Our Little House

The view of our road

I could say that the weather has gone to the dogs around here. It has been rainy, nasty and cold, but that wouldn’t be a fair state­ment, because my dogs don’t even like it.

This month should be Indian Summer around here in the Ozarks. Instead, it has has been the 4^th cold­est on record and the 8^th wettest.

For a brief moment yes­ter­day, I thought the sun might pop out. I really think the dogs even noticed the change in light in The Belle Writer’s Studio, but it faded before even really gain­ing any momen­tum, and they did again as well.

We’re expect­ing a frost on Saturday morn­ing and they’re call­ing for a hard freeze by Sunday morn­ing. This isn’t sup­posed to be hap­pen­ing here, not in mid-October. We moved to the south, just far enough to have a change in sea­sons, but to also have a lit­tle longer warm sea­son. We tol­er­ate the humid­ity and bugs in the sum­mer so we can have bet­ter weather for longer.

There was even the year we cel­e­brated New Year’s Eve on the party deck – until Midnight – with just a jacket.

The wood­burn­ing stove in The Little House

The only thing pos­i­tive I can think of to say about this type of weather is that we will lit­er­ally be keep­ing the home fires burn­ing this week­end and hun­ker­ing down in The Little House.

Last week­end was about get­ting out; this one’s about stay­ing in. We heat exclu­sively with a wood burn­ing stove and not only does my hus­band need some time to cut some wood, we will be burn­ing it too.

We also need to fig­ure out how to get my huge plant that lives on the party deck in the sum­mer, over to The Belle Writer’s Studio, where it resides in the cold weather. My mother in law gave me that plant in a lit­tle pot for a wed­ding shower gift over 23 years ago.

Today, the plant and pot weighs over 200 pounds – and that’s not when it is full of water – so it will be tricky mov­ing it this year.

While Dale is work­ing hard chop­ping wood and drag­ging in my huge plant from the party deck all the way over to The Belle Writer’s Studio, I’ll be labor­ing on assign­ments, tak­ing just a cou­ple of hours on Saturday morn­ing to attend my book club.

I would rather be lazily snug­gly warm under a blan­ket with one of the books I have back­ing up on my “to read pile,” but it’s been a tough year for free­lance jour­nal­ists and I’m just happy I have the work.There will be many more week­ends in the com­ing months when the work isn’t here, I’m sure.

If the sun does make an appear­ance, I will have to do some laun­dry. I use a clothes­line to hang most of our shirts and pants out to dry and it’s a lit­tle hard to get them dry in the pour­ing rain.

Actually, my friend, Roxanne has an excel­lent post this week on her Champion of my Heart web­site for Blog Action Day about air-drying clothes. I hope you’ll click over and read it.

Sunset Behind the Little House

As the sun (hope­fully we’ll see it by Saturday) sets, we’ll come together in the evening with a cou­ple of movies from Netflix, one of my crock­pot recipes and maybe even some marsh­mal­lows to toast for dessert.

The weather isn’t doing any­thing for me, but the thought of turn­ing it into a cozy week­end at Campbell Town has already got me look­ing for­ward to keep­ing the home fires burning.

Will you be doing to pre­pare for the com­ing win­ter months this week­end, or what is on your sched­ule for the next two days?