It is truly amazing to me that we are now at the last two weeks of the current year. The stockings are back out and we are getting ready for Christmas. Each week as I write this blog and note the week numbers I also note the passing of time as it flies by not only on my computer but in our daily life. The snow is swirling around outside right now in short and intense squalls. The neatest thing about this house are the big windows that wrap around the living room area and bring the outdoors inside. We are in a bit of a fish bowl yes, but there are no houses facing our direction and only trees that we see outside the windows. A few times I have commented to John that we appear to be living in a snow globe. I love it when that happens.

Our HGTV Update

This past week we focused exclusively on the furnace and the hot water. Monday morning it was very apparent there was something very wrong with the furnace and heating system. We turned off all the thermostats in the house only to find that we couldn’t cool off the house. We woke up to the living room temperature registering 78 degrees with no heat turned on. Well, no instructed heat that is. The furnace had a mind of its own and insisted on sending hot water throughout the system whether we wanted it to or not. The flip side was we didn’t have any hot water for showers or dishes or laundry. This necessitated an emergency call to Mason, our plumber, who had recently installed the new radiators in our room and Jack’s room and who had boosted the pressure in the system. I know more about furnaces now than I need to know! Seems the back flow valves were not working and any call to the furnace, for whatever reason, sent hot (way too hot) water throughout the system. We weren’t able to control the temperature on the hot water because the mixing valve was so old and rusted we couldn’t do anything with it. Thus we had hot water that could scald you if you weren’t careful. Well now that was all messed up. We tried an experiment after the first visit to check the system and when that didn’t work we called him again. He answered the phone with “oh this can’t be good” without even asking who was calling. After another visit things were much better and by Wednesday we were well on our way to getting this issue solved.

On Wednesday, Mason’s son Kenny came to change out the mixing valve and when he arrived he walked in the house and asked how things were. My answer surprised him as I was standing in the laundry/furnace room laughing. About one hour before he arrived I was moving things around in the laundry room (trying to fix another problem with the dryer) and managed to drop an entire can (small) of paint upside down on the laundry room floor. Nothing but to go ahead and paint the floor. You couldn’t mop up that much paint so I got out the roller and just pushed the paint around until I had covered most of the floor. Knowing that Kenny was coming at some point I left a little spot unpainted so he could get to the furnace. I am so lucky he has a sense of humor. I left him to it and went for a walk with the dogs. Ultimately the furnace was fixed, the hot water was fixed and the laundry room floor got painted rather sooner than I expected it to.

In the middle of all that, I moved the dryer and discovered that the dryer vent was not acceptable. This gave John a two day project trying to replace the dryer venting system. Between a 4 inch hose fitting into a 3 inch hole in the wall and finding the right clamps, he had a lot of fun. Until it was hooked up again we used an old stocking as the vent cover. A trick I learned from my mother who used to do that in the winter to get humidity into the house. The dryer is now working again too.

So, we went away for 24 hours!

Walking Group

Had a wonderful week of walking on my own and with my walking group. Two wonderful group walks, one which included five dogs and three humans and one with three humans and four dogs. The wonderful things is how much they all enjoy each other. We started the week with lots of snow and snow shoes were the best way to walk through the woods to ending up the week with so much water and very little snow that I needed hip waders. Somewhere in there was a day with a lot of ice which made the walking very tentative. I have ordered my yak traks. I always walk with a stick and sometimes with two sticks which has come in very handy on numerous occasions.

Hearty Recipe of the Week

Turkey and Beef Meatloaf ala Nancy

1 lb of ground turkey
1 lb of ground beef
1 onion
Panko Bread Crumbs
2 eggs Worchestershire Sauce
Salt & Pepper to taste
1/4 cup ketchup
2 tblspn dry mustard
1/4 cup brown sugar

Mix together the two eggs, worchestershire sauce, salt and pepper and set aside.
Put the ground turkey and ground beef in a large bowl and mix together, Chop up the onion and add it to the meat mixture. Blend in the egg mixture. Sprinkle enough bread crumbs to hold it all together.
Place in a loaf pan or a square pan that allows the mixture to be about 2 inches thick.
Mix the ketchup, brown sugar and mustard together and spread over the top of the meat mixture.
Bake at 425 for about an hour.

Serve with baked potatoes or baked sweet potatoes and your favorite vegetable. Mine is broccoli, John’s is peas.

This year’s Christmas Letter can be found by CLICKING HERE! Enjoy.