MINUS -20C

Minus 20 C... sounds really cold but it is actually only -4 F... I can remember in our early marriage, we managed   -45 F with no problem... we had no running water so that meant no flush toilet so that meant putting on the pants, boots, parka, hat and gloves just to go for a pee at 2 am... lucky for me in those days I was much younger and my bladder much stronger so those night trips were few and far between.. That house had been a grainery at one time, it had wood shavings as insulation and cardboard (painted blue) on the walls... having a bath was a real chore... we had an old cast iron bathtub in a back room with no HEAT...so we plugged in a heater, and fill up as many buckets that we owned (about 6  i would think) we would have to go down to the hand pump, fill up two buckets at a time, pack them up thru 2 to 3 feet of snow, put them  on the wood stove, crank up the stove and wait a couple of hours.  By the time the water was almost boiling, the tub room was at about 30 degrees F..just around freezing.  you have got to remember that that tub was cast iron and it was cold... so now we had to move really fast...empty the buckets into the tub... the buckets must have held around 2 to 3 gallons, so you were looking at about  12 to 15 gallons in a tub that probably held 100 gallons, so you had about 4 inches of boiling water in the tub... it was too hot to get into, so then you had to rush down to the pump, pump two buckets of water, rush back up to cold tub room, very gently add the cold water and hope you didn't put too much cold in.. of course the cast iron really sucked up the heat... you had to have everything ready, hop into the tub, wet up, soap up and rise as fast as you could.. never washed my hair in the tub...took too long... so always washed it in the sink...We feed 150 cows a day while we lived there, and we went snowshoeing every weekend, no matter how cold it was..We lived there for 2 winters, and of course the spring that we left there, the owner put in a real bathroom...with heat... Summers were great up there, we rode on the cows almost everyday... cut firewood and sold it, dug earthworms for the fishing camp, and generally had a great time...

Gave my agiltiy instructor her 60th birthday shawl on Friday nite, and she was very happy with it...i was really happy with the beads.. It is the Swallow tail pattern..the fibre is superwash BFL.. which i really love... the colour was a bright pink that i didn't like so i did up a light blue dye pot, and overdyed the bright pink, then i was happy with the colour...

Sorry but i can't  download anymore pictures..dumb program... i really like the MS Live Writer, but it is acting up and keeps putting my new blogs in March 09 ... weird.. I emailed them a couple of weeks ago and still haven't heard from them...  better go and get my act in gear... even feed the wild birds this morning.. they weren't out of feed, but like to see a full feeder... see ya soon............