Aaron emptying the ash into the metal tin
There is one thing we have to do every single morning, regardless of what day it is. We have to remove the ash from our wood stove, and empty it out into a metal can outside. Depending on how much wood we burn each day, the amount of ash varies. It's significantly easier to empty the tray of ash when the stove has cooled, but since it's so cold here, we try to never let the stove go out. In our 10 nights, Aaron has woken up to refill the fire seven times in the early, early AM hours, and Jen, who always wakes up, has refilled the fire zero times. Last night, we just rolled over into each other's arms, so when we woke at 8am, the fire was all out. This made emptying the ash tray easier, but made our feet much colder for the first few steps on the wooden floor.
It was back to work today. We spent the morning preparing for clearing woods, and spent the late morning and early afternoon cutting down perfectly healthy trees and hauling them away. The site we cleared is where Paul's rec center will eventually live. Paul cut down three pine trees with chain saws, and Jen, Aaron, and Paul's neighbor Bill pulled them away. Paul jokes that Bill and his family have lived in these mountains so long they don't even speak english...they speak King's English. Bill does speak with a southern twang, but there is something mysteriously british about it. The job wasn't as tedious as working at the saw mill was last week. Aaron kept taking small limbs and fanning them at Jen, making jokes how if she were a queen, and he were her loyal subject, he'd have to fan her all day long. Clearly this was not the case since Jen was hauling away more than her share of limbs while Aaron helped Bill pull away bigger logs with the tractor and a chain. This task was new to Aaron, and so he had trouble mastering it. Once the trees were down and the logs hauled to the mill, we all loaded the small limbs onto a trailer attached to the rear of Paul's tractor. We had to stomp the limbs down in order to fit as many as possible in one trip. Aaron again tried to make light of the job by saying the pine tree limbs smelled better than Pine Sol. We took the tractor full of limbs and dumped them into a gully. Paul remarked it would make great compost in 20 years. Hope we're not around to help with that!
When we returned from clearing, are stomachs were gurgling with hunger. We made grilled cheese sandwiches and enjoyed them with tomato soup. We made the soup yesterday in a crock pot, and it was unexpectedly delicious. Neither of us have used a crock pot too much, so we are still trying to figure out the best strategies. When making soup, we typically like to begin by sautéing onions and carrots and celery, but when you use a crock pot, you can't really do that, so we just added some canned tomatoes, water, some seasoning, and a tiny bit of rice and somehow the soup turned out really well. We also ate popcorn cooked on the stovetop with lunch, something we've been devouring recently. Why Americans ever moved away from popping pop corn on the stove top and towards microwaveable popcorn loaded with preservatives and additives boggles our minds.
Lara brought us a fresh supply of groceries today, and for dinner we took advantage. We cooked up some quinoa and flavored it with a pesto sauce that Lara made fresh and froze from this summer. To accompany the grain, we ate fried plantains, and a coconut curry tofu dish. It was the second time we ate curry tofu, and this time was much better than the first. To it we added sautéed onions, carrots, a bit of butter, and more coconut powder and less curry, which gave it a sweeter, less spicy taste. Making meals together is always one of the daily highlights. When cooking, we usually try to get the fire really roaring, so when we eat, it's super warm in our cabin. Our stove has a damper that opens and shuts, and when we feed the fire, it has to be open because fresh wood makes more smoke. But the damper is broken, so often times in the middle of cooking, smoke will billow out of the fire, rise, and get trapped in those pesky smoke detectors. When this happens, we have to race upstairs to hush the detector from making an awful shrilling noise. The worse part is that Jen can't reach the smoke detectors, so she must leap and try to push the proper button in order to silence it. Good thing Aaron is tall. And despite the fact that we have grown much more confident in our fire making abilities, it hasn't changed the fact that the smoke alarms go off roughly 2-4 times a day. Which reminds us: Have you checked your smoke detector batteries recently?
Jen has the sniffles and so hopefully they'll go away really soon.
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