Wow! Cold!

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I can't help but wonder as I see the map of Canada, -40 wind chill factor.

I don't even want to think about how cold that is for man and animal; probably where they came up with the idea of garden statues.


Last week, as the wintry weather set in, we had another example of how we are protected. This minivan we've got is only going to go so far without having the funds to make repairs on it, but we are nursing it along as best we can. I make sure to get it serviced pretty regularly, but the broken things are more difficult.

We got up very early and warmed up the van for getting to an office cleaning before church. We had two to get to that day and still try to make it. We did, and after visiting for a while afterwards, the car inexplicably would not start. It finally did with jumper cables but I know batteries and that was just not normal. Sure enough, at AutoZone they ran a test and said they'd never seen a battery do that before. The guage steadily dropped as they held it to the battery.

He said it looked like the battery had sudden catastrophic failure, and either my alternator was bad, or the battery, when it malfunctioned so badly, actually ruined the alternator. Yikes! Another 200 dollar part, plus labor! I thought I might cry. I think I'm tired. LOL

My battery warranty was up. But one guy said he'd pro-rate it for me. I could get a replacement at a cheaper price. The guy in charge saw him and said, "Can't do that, it's too far over warranty."

As I stood there wondering what God was going to do. The guy in charge suddenly picked up a new battery and carried it out to my car. This is the same guy that had previously said they were not allowed to work on my car because the battery is buried too deeply in the compartment.

I asked how much I would have to pay for this new battery - the first guy quietly said that they were going to replace it for free! AND they were going to do it for me after all.

Praise God! I sat in a sheltered car while the guy stood out in the snow for 30 minutes, rapping his bloody knuckles and changing my battery. Then he checked the alternator again and said it seemed to be fine.

I'm still looking for that milder winter that Accuweather promised in their long-range forecast. Maybe in January?

I've been outside, moving very dry snow off of our porches. Michael is disappointed that it's not the best for snowballs, but it's very pretty, and we are even getting some sunshine trying to peak between the clouds. It is so light, it almost poofs up like talcum powder when you shovel it.

We winterized the pool in between these two massive arctic blasts, and it's a good thing because we are going to end up with several inches of ice on the top.

Since Thanksgiving and the cold weather occurred, I've not had the chance to get out there and work on the greenhouse any more. Actually, we've not done much outdoors at all.

I've been sick for a week, and it seems to be really getting worse today. I'm hoping it's the peak of the germ warfare, and after today, my antibodies will be short. "Short", a military term for those who do not have long until their tour is over.

So I've got on a Santa hat. Not because I'm dressing like Santa, but because as we have been slowly unpacking Christmas stuff and decorating, it came in very handy to keep me warm.

We are having to cut way back on everything right now. Christmas will be really nice. No gifts this year. Instead we are going to relish the joy of really focusing on the Lord and others. We've also got our thermostat set way down to about 60. So we are layering! WooHOOOO! It's actually helpful when we go out of doors, because we are not hit by a sudden shock of cold air that we are not used to.

And we are so thankful for a freezer full of our garden produce and canned goods we can freely eat from!

I found an adorable framed print at the grocery store. A little girl, dreaming of being a ballerina, and I added some three dimensional ballerinas to the front. A little bit of paint, and it's going on eBay. All the thrift stores around here are having huge sales. That's helpful when I'm trying to find fabric for practicing sewing some custom shirts for Michael. Fabric is just to expensive for practice, so old sheets and tablecloths are like manna from Heaven!

We had a fun dance after church yesterday. I knew I should not have danced, being sick, but I washed up well so as not spread germs, and then proceeded to have my lungs set on fire from being out of breath. Nothing will clear out your sinuses like good exercise!

~Faith

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List for today.

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After a $400.00+ day at the repair shop and helping my mom and dad all day long on their front yard project and dinner with freshly baked (and flattish) 100% whole wheat bread (very long run on sentence) in which we were so happy to be a blessing to my folks for the day and in which, despite being faithful to my juicing I ended up eating too much leftover Halloween candy from stressing out over the unplanned repairs on the van, we will continue to enjoy a week in which most of our regular activities were canceled.

So it's a work day here at home for me, and for Michael, when his school work is done. I have a wish list in front of me. Maybe I should add "Clean off desk" to it.... Nah.

1. Drive about 10 beautiful country miles to a farm and buy as many bales of straw as will fit into the back of the minivan. I might fit 10 or 12. Good deal, but no delivery.

2. Mulch the freshly manured gooseberry plantings with 2 bales of straw.

3. Repair the barbed wire fence that the neighbor's cows keep busting up. They did not come through yet, but it's torn down again. Probably the long-horn crosses. They really learn how to use those horns as tearing tools.

4. While back there making repairs, also pick up a wheelbarrow-sized load of manure for the raspberries.

5. Spread the manure in preparation for the rootings which should be here soon.

6. Leave 5 bales of straw next to raspberry row.

7. Neatly stack and cover the free lumber we got from my dad with the the $5.00 doors we found at the thrift store. These are for the future tables in the greenhouse.

8. Fasten the side base boards to the greenhouse hoops in preparation for walls. Wear black-widow smashing shoes. WooHoo! That stack next to my driveway for years will finally be gone.

9. Draw out a plan for building the ends, now that I have the storm doors (5 dollars at the thrift store) and locate the lumber from the wood pile. Hope there is enough there that has not rotted.

10. Cover 6 figs in straw (whatever is left) build cages or use rope to contain them, and cover with tarps.

11. Try to get some rest before doing an office cleaning tonight. :o)

I am glad that I have 3 good days of sun, in case I can't finish this as I hope to.

5:45 am. Time to clean house, juice, cook breakfast, pray, and load my iPod with Bible study lessons for the day.

Awaiting a beautiful sunrise,

~Faith

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Notes To Self

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#1 Kitchen towels are not interchangeable with paper plates in a microwave.

#2 Potatoes make wrinkled, unattractive centers for burning kitchen cloths.

#3 Whenever you take a car to a shop, figure on your repair being twice what was expected.

#4 Father's are very nice to have. They give you free used lumber for greenhouse projects.

#5 Ban ginger from your morning juicing.

#6 Lysol kills ladybugs and stinkbugs.

#7 When car repair guys begin by calling your 'honey' you have lost about 20 years of respect. Only acceptable if you get a discount.

#8 Keep trying. You are bound to make a decent 100% whole wheat bread loaf eventually.

#9 Buy everything you will need in life before 2011. Inflation is going to kill you.

#10 Go to bed.

~Faith

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Car Repair and... Tapeworms? ~~ May 27, 2010

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As things tend to continually fall apart, we have been watching our little mini-van begin to struggle. Just like me, it's beginning to get old, tired, and things are going wrong. I try to get it serviced when the time comes, but sometimes we are a bit late.

A year ago, the hatch quit staying up. Gotta love the loading and unloading of groceries in the rain while one hand holds the door up, the foot hold the cart from running away, the other hand loads the bags, while rain runs down your arm.





The tires we continually have trouble with, and one has had a slow leak for well over a year. The A/C quit working two years ago, and with my window not working, that leaves us with one window to let airflow in during summer - (Gasp). And the remaining window is just now beginning to not work. THIS is going to be a challenge!

But it starts every time!!! YAY!

So when the tire was not holding air even for a couple of days, we took it for a hopeful repair, which worked! Can I hear another "YAY!"





We also splurged 60 bucks and felt it was worth fixing the hatch door to make our lives so much easier. Michael took charge of replacing the lift supports.





And he did a great job!





We moved on to working on the pool. We finished up getting the sand just right and began filling it, making sure to keep the liner as wrinkle-free as possible.

The best way to do this is to spread your liner out evenly and clip the edges up on the pool walls with heavy duty tool-shop clips. These work great. Put one about every two feet.





Then pull the liner tight, evenly all the way around, taking all the slack out of the liner, then actually pulling almost all of it off the ground except for the center. Leave about 6 feet touching the ground. Begin filling with water. As the water fills and begins moving out, it will pull the liner down, and you can let out the clips little by little as you walk around and around. Each time you loosen the clamp, the liner will slide down just a bit and there will be no wrinkles in the pool.

Conversely, you can use a wet/dry vac to suck air out from between the liner and the wall, avoiding the tedious walking and releasing of clips, but my vac is too small and this is how I'm familiar with doing it. Once your water actually reaches the wall, the liner will be done pulling down and you can affix the top coping and rails to finish the walls.

Michael got in, when the water was about knee high, to work the inside of the pool as we installed the top rail. He said there was something swimming at his feet, that looked like a snake.





I took one look at that and stopped in my tracks. All I could think was tapeworm, and WHERE DID IT COME FROM?

It went into a jar of water and I took a trip to the Great Storehouse of Modern Knowledge - Google Search.

Learn something new every day!

Remember all those stories you heard about horse hairs turning into worms in water troughs? Yeah, I didn't believe them either, but this is where those stories came from. These are Nematomorpha, otherwise known as hairworms.

They are ingested by insects, grow, then drive the insect to water where the parasite exits the body, killing it's host, looks for a girlfriend at the local pool, gets married and has little ones all over again.

How romantic!

Really cool, interesting and icky pictures!

And YouTube has some nifty videos too, if you have a young person who enjoys watching recreations of the scenes in "Alien" where a parasite exits the body of a victim.

Ours was about a foot long.





It's dead.

~Faith

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Them Are Some Big Rats!

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That's what I was thinking at 4 am yesterday morning as I heard scuttling in the walls and could even FEEL the vibrations from them.

However, as the sun rose, I was relieved, sort of, to find this:





The weight of all the rainwater this week finally pulled the sukkah over onto the house, where it slowly slid down into this sorry pile you see now.

Lesson learned, either invest in building sukkah a lot sturdier, or don't try to put one up if the weather is going to be bad. We had not gotten much time in it anyway, so I was a little disappointed. But the sun came out as we were working so we spread all the fabric out to dry.





Here is the Autumn color beginning to be more noticeable lately. It feels so Autumn-like this week!





A new victim has fallen prey to our wild and keeeeeeeeerazy group of sewing and dance aficionados. She is a natural dancer!





Dorcas, dressed again for the occasion.





Having taken up a new sport this year, we've added a second model to our racing fleet.

The first model is still in use at the other dental track, but is the handle and no-wheels type.





THIS baby really flies!





And we get multi-level tracks, because this place is huge! Elevator up!





I think all places everywhere should have charming nooks about every 75 feet, don't you? After cleaning that office last week, I took the time to take a few photos in the area where it sits. Here is an alleyway. I love when old downtowns are renovated.





Early Sunday mornings are a prime time to go on a photo hunt.









We began our day yesterday with the tornado-inspired sukkah cave in, and we ended the day with getting in the car at nearly 11 pm, only to find our oil light suddenly screaming at us, "CODE RED! CODE RED!"

Bummer, can we make it to Walmart?

No, the car is overheating right now. Drat! That means we have to stop at a convenience station to check the oil. Sure enough, almost to the end of the dipstick.

Can we make it to Walmart?

Better not risk the engine... Taking the quart up to the register, the girl with tattoos and chewing gum rings it up and emits a half choke - half giggle.

"What?" I say.

"That's what you pay for convenience." $4.98

Remind me, today I need to add oil into the van from our stash here at home.

~Faith

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I Have A Confession.

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I hate video games, they are limited in my home. But I have fallen victim to one.

Most people would not consider this a game, but I do. It's a ridiculous waste of my time and it's on this screen I am looking at right now, and that makes it video.

www.FloorPlanner.com

Yup, we leave it open on the PC and, at various times throughout the day, we stop by for a few moments and add on to our dream home.

It's educational in a way, you might say. True, but it's also sheer fantasy. This dream home has about 30,000 square feet, and that's NOT counting the 20 foot wrap around covered porch with complete wrap-around deck above.

But, if you need a fun distraction through the slower winter months, have at it. It's free for home use and you can have 3 plans saved.

Don't let the small size of the grid fool you. We quickly pushed the limits and found the grid expands as you build on, and on, and on....

Yesterday we went to can the last of those pears and apples I'd not gotten too. And they were way too far gone.

So the horses got some nice treats, and the compost pile is a bit larger. And my back porch is emptier.

Michael has just about gotten his school work done and we are heading out to sew with friends and practice dancing.

Here was last week's get together.





One young girl was in a wheelchair all last year. She's out of it, and dancing for her is slow and a bit shuffly, but she is having a wonderful time.

Ashlee and Elaine, at my place last week. Working on an overskirt. I had to sneak this photo!





And Leah, helping me fix my dropped loops in a knitting project for my daughter.





And would you believe this amazing sewing job! Ashlee is just learning to sew, and she was so happy with her progress on the skirt, that she went and got herself a pattern and is sewing this cute sundress, all by herself! I am ecstatic to see her discover a talent she did not know she had.





Last week I also began to try to work on this truck again.





Typical beater-type truck: can of starting fluid, and a pair of pliers to be able to open the hood, since the handle broke off.





It's so bad to leave a vehicle uncared for, but I have not been able to get to it. The tires badly need to be moved as they are developing severe flat spots.





So we got some handy old mobile home skirting sheets that I keep around for this kind of work.





And we needed to see about draining the old gas out of the tanks, as it goes bad if not used. I turned on the key to see how much gas we were going to be dealing with in the two tanks, and found that I had no power at all.





Time to drag out the charger again.





Put your red on positive, and the black on negative, then plug the charger in.









And don't let this fool you. For some reason, the charger reads full at first, then it slowly drops over the next hour or so, then begins to come back up again. I'm not convinced I have a correctly functioning charger...





Underneath the truck, I find an exhaust pipe that has broken off the muffler which is help up by baling wire.... bummer.





I do locate the two tanks, and follow the hoses coming out of them up to this little unit, of which I have no idea what it's called. Generally, I'll look this up, but I have no time at this moment, as I am desperately trying to get off to sewing again!





And that's where I THINK I will need to be working if I drain the tanks. However, I've got to get the electrical problem fixed first, and the (hopefully) charged battery is sitting on the truck cab floor, waiting for me to grace it with my presence.

Seamstress by day, grease monkey by night...

~Faith

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Changing an Oil Filter

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A special thanks to Norm, who motivated me with encouragement and got my brain in gear.

Find a level place and make sure your engine is warm so the oil flows out well.





Remove dipstick, so there is free movement of the oil as it flows out of the bottom of the engine and you don't hold it up.





Get the right oil, according to manufacturers instructions.





We did not have enough SAE30, but SAE10w30 was OK for winter usage. We will just have to monitor it to make sure it does not burn off and run low before we expect it to. So we had 1.25 quarts of the 2 quarts needed for our particular engine.





We added in the other .75 quarts with the multi-grade oil.





Get your oil catcher ready. This is nice, you let the oil flow into the holes, cap it up, then haul it off to be recycled.





Here is the location of the drain on our engine.





Flip open the cap.





Insert a drain hose to run from the engine...





neatly down into the oil catch container.









Here is how you then open the drain.





Hard to see Michael do this part...





And you can see the old, dirty oil begin to flow down. It's very dark and filled with dirt particles.









We let it drain about 5 minutes.





Now reverse the process. Close the drain, remove the hose, and close the little cap.









Now it's time to change the oil filter. The new one is ready for replacing, up on top of the engine.





It should be just hand tight. Unscrew, counterclockwise.





It was a little tight for Michael, so we got out the oil filter wrench. These come in different sizes for various filters on many vehicles and equipment. Luckily, we had the correct one we needed.





Push it on and gently rotate the filter until it comes loose.





Now it's loose and Michael can just unscrew it easily.





Here is where we discovered the levelest spot we had was still not level enough. It would have been better to have the drain spout on the lower side. Some oil is going to remain in your filter no matter what, but additional oil had pooled up and flowed out as we removed the filter.





We also had a surprise.





A dead mouse. They are everywhere in our cars. The mice have thrived this year and we are finding them in all the vehicles, even the mini van, which drive daily.





Make sure you don't get dirt or debris in the oil filter or the filter opening. You want that to remain nice and clean.





Take the protective cap off.





Gently lubricate the gasket with a bit of oil on your finger.





Then screw the new filter on, clockwise, until it's nice and snug.





Michael felt more comfortable using the filter wrench again.





You are NOT DONE!

Don't drive off until you've refilled!!! We didn't use the funnel, as it had dirt in it. So we poured very carefully. Won't hurt much to get oil on the exterior of an engine, but it can smell if it burns off when your engine gets hot.
The new oil is light colored and clear.





Here is the indicator. I am guessing that since my husband left us the same year we bought this, that it never had the oil changed until today. Bad. I should have been more on the ball than this. So many things to think about.





I hope this little tutorial is helpful. Be sure to check your owners manual to get specifics for your mower. And these basic instructions work on a car as well, just a little variation.

A little known fact about me - I produced and starred in a car repair video way back in the 1980's. I used to be able to tell you every make, model and year of every vehicle on the road, and could tell you how to repair them. It's been a long while and I've forgotten much.

Cars were much easier to work on then.

~Faith

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