October 22, 2011

Saturday, October 22, 2011

What I cooked today:
Chocolate chip cookies
 Connor made the recipe and I cooked them.  Of course, he was trying really hard to help and I ended up bumping him with the pan, which resulted in a nasty burn on his arm, and a significant amount of guilt on my side.

Split Pea Soup
  I found a recipe that didn't use ham, since I don't have any.  I cooked everything on my stove, then transferred to the crock pot.  But I forgot to check to make sure the crock pot was actually plugged in, wasting an hour.  And the recipe called for 1-2 hours of simmering, but it wasn't ready for about 3 hours.  We had lunch around 4 today. 

Burgers and Potatoes
  My old standby, which works fine. 

Number of loads of laundry: 4
  I hate laundry.  But I'm laughing at my 8 boxes of linens (towels, sheets, etc) and another 6-7 boxes of clothes.  I really don't want to unpack those boxes.  If I unpack the boxes, people will wear those clothes and use the linens, which will leave me with more clothes to wash. 

Update:
So, we recently bought a Pellet Stove to heat the house. 

I had never heard of a pellet stove prior to our move.  When we asked to rent the house, we were told that it had two working fireplaces, and an electric heater, along with a forced heated air system.  Of course, we weren't told about the high price of propane.  The owner told us that he had to fill the propane tank almost every month, at about $700 per month, to keep the house heated through the winter. That's more than we spent during the summers in California, keeping the house at 70 degrees when it was 105 outside. 

We thought we could get firewood from the national forest (about $5 a cord, if you cut it yourself) and use the wood fireplace.  When we got here, we realized the wood fireplace was installed into half of my master closet, probably 20 years ago, and the blower doesn't really work anyway.  It just eats wood and doesn't heat much. 

The second fireplace is propane, which defeats the desire to NOT use the propane.  The forced air heater is also propane.  And the electric heater is a space heater that doesn't start. 

So, we decided on a pellet stove.  Since we are renting the place (for now), we couldn't make any significant modifications to the house.  Then, we found a pellet stove that sticks in your window.  It's similar to a window air conditioner.  But, we wanted it in the family room, which doesn't have any windows.  So, what do all self-reliant people do in this situation?  We bought a door, replaced the door to the backyard, and cut a hole in it. 

Feeling very smug with ourselves, we turned it on.  Nothing happened.

Smart people would have started it in the garage prior to installation.  So, we removed it and realized that auger (the part that feeds pellets into the heat unit, looks like a big drill bit) was stuck and not moving. 

Now, in California, we would just return it to the store and get a new one.  But, in this case, we called their customer service, who had us take it apart to figure out what was wrong.  We laughed and said we were afraid of voiding our warranty.  She said the warranty couldn't be voided and said she would send us a new auger.  After we hung up, we pulled out the auger, and used a file to remove a burr that was scraping against the shaft.  7 hours later, it worked great. 

We re-installed it and now it heats the family room great.  However, we'll have to see what happens when it's actually cold outside.