Now the cold comes

So we've had a couple of snowy days, and today a wicked cold wind moved in. Brrrrrr.

I've been sitting on my butt reading and slurping tea since Christmas. Today I decided to get a few things done, starting with the chicken-yard roof, which collapsed overnight under the snow and ice. It's set up like a circus tent with heavy wires running up to a center pole, and chicken wire and bird netting draped over that. The wires popped loose on the west half, and C. helped me stretch them back into place.

C. went inside and banged the snow loose. At least now the birds can booble around in the fresh air without worrying about hawks or owls. They decided it was too cold for boobling, though, and went in to bed early.

That was it for outside work on this cold day (supposed to get down to zero tonight).

I've decided to work on improving the kitchen, something we've been thinking about for a long time. Basically, there's a nine-foot-long island of three cabinets with sink and dishwasher. The wall space is taken up with our giant fridge, our vintage pink stove (also huge), our big countertop microwave/convection oven and two old wheeled cabinets from a home-ec classroom. And an old china cabinet from the church near our Ancestral Home. Our baking is done on an eight-foot stretch of 1890s-era cupboard on the back side of the island, so any time you are baking and need the fridge or sink or stove you have to walk all the way around the island. Every time I bake something I get all pissed off. (And I like to bake. It leads to eating baked goods.) So the plan is to move the china cabinet out into the dining room, which means moving the shelf of craft-supplies-that-must-not-freeze out of there. So I'm making a tall cupboard from a stack of scrounged upper kitchen cabinets in a corner of the dining room for the art supplies. That's Step 1. (They will be so ugly that I am confident C. will be driven to paint them. Step 2.) Moving the china cabinet and contents (mostly canned and dried food) is Step 3. Thinking about all this has made me tired. Better find another book and put the kettle on.

I made another experimental chocolate-and-peanut-butter thing, but bought puffed rice instead of crispy rice so it's soggy instead of crispy. Idiot! But it's chocolatey and peanut-buttery, and tolerable with tea. And I'm experimenting with herbed dough in the bread machine, hoping to come up with rolls that are delicious under the broiler with bubbly cheese. (That's not hard, as anything, probably even cardboard, is delicious with bubbly cheese.) I used fresh basil from the plants C. brought in from the garden, and some crumbled dried tomatoes.

We're broke until payday, Wednesday, so we're making do with whatever is in the cupboards – lots of canned goods, not so much butter, eggs and milk.

C. is obsessed with gathering tiny, tiny guinea feathers from the chicken house. I think it's weird, unlike my obsessions, which are brilliant and compelling.

The feathers are kind of cool, actually, with their tiny polka dots.