It’s cold today. Yesterday it was too, but the sun was out in full force. Overcast here today. So it’s decidedly colder feeling in the house today.
Here is our Fireplace from just a few minutes ago:
Ah, nice and warm. Well, IT is. Being right by it is toasty. 
But I have a series of pictures that show that the sun IS coming soon! Here they are:
On days like today we keep a electric space heater running in the “family room” which is the “basement” just a walkout space, a slab as otherwise known. On the main floor, over a crawlspace, we have to keep a fire going in the “dining room” which is what “is supposed to be the Living Room but we made an actual ‘dining room’ “since it’s too small for an effective ‘family/living room’ though we did use it as that for most of the years we’ve been in this house.
Days like today are the odd ones, most days are more mild in the Winter. It never got above freezing today, in fact didn’t even get withing a few degrees of that special temperature. Add the gusty winds into the mix, and it was in the teens or lower, single digits, all day, as “feels like” temperatures.
I wore socks and long boots, and a knit pant for warmth under my very long big tiered “western” denim skirt (which we got for $20 at some western shop last year … it was a much higher priced item originally), and a thin wool turtleneck longsleeve sweater. I’ve been alright all day like this. Not really cold, just cold hands on and off, but easily fixable. My feet, amazingly, have not gotten cold. 
That’s the deal killer for me. Oft times even wearing boots I do get cold feet.
I’m not complaining about today then!
I went out one time this morning. I put on my long lined raincoat, which is like a Spring Coat, sort of, and felt fine going out to the hens to check on them, etc. I came back inside and realized my face was the only cold thing, it felt like my sinuses were frozen entirely. Yes, that cold. Cold enough to do that, but that snippy cold didn’t feel so cold otherwise. Kind of like, very cold is like that. Dress for it and it only affects your nose and sinuses if left unprotected.
So even that though didn’t make my feet cold. I hate having cold feet. It’s misery of miseries.
Frank was telling me about a radio guy, Steak Shapiro, about when he got cold feet at a football game, as Frank had heard it on the radio today or yesterday or something. It was funny. Kind of like he turns into a totally different person. Yeah, I know about that firsthand, myself! I have the reverse in hot weather. Above 75 and I melt fast and become a totally different person.
So it’s important to have warm feet. Sometime in the last week or so there was a “cold” day and my feet got really cold. I had to go get in bed for a long time. Even then, they didn’t get warm enough. So finally Frank took us out to Barnes and Noble to read and be warm for the evening. I had to get my feet warm first though. If I have cold feet in shoes, then the shoes HURT horribly. Frank says he doesn’t experience that. Hmph. Figures. I do. It feels like any shoe I put on is pinching my toes, too tight, even if they aren’t, which none of my shoes really do anyway.
I had to fill the tub with hot water and soak my feet before getting ready to leave. I could have done that before, but really, having cold feet turns off your mind as to all the possible ways to get out of that predicament. Only the “lets go out” speech from hubby turned out that answer in my brain. Oh yeah, soak them!
Ah, it was so nice. It took awhile to get them there, but eventually they were warm. I dried them off and hopped in bed again to be sure to keep them warm for a bit, then put on socks under the covers and my boots. That did it. I was fine.
It’s funny how cold feet get. Just that once they are cold, they are cold. It’s a horrible cycle. In the summer my feet can’t get too hot. Only my neck and head can. It’s really my neck, the thermostat at the base of the head in the back. It’s the place that regulates temps. So that place though doesn’t make my feet warm in the Winter. Funny how it is. Cold feet make me nuts. Shut me down. But it doesn’t mean my whole body is cold. Just my feet is enough.
In the Hot Summer, it’s my neck that has to be fooled into being cooler to not freak my body out. If I can’t have ice or a cold bag or can of something on there, I go wacko, get mean easy, etc. My cold feet thing is that I can get mean easy, but it’s more or less that I can’t handle stress as easy, and I can’t function right. In Summer I can handle NO stress at all. It’s like I live for cool evening breezes, and on some days, there are none of those.
So here I sit in a chilly house, fine and warm, next to a fireplace fire, and I’m thinking of the miseries of Summer. 
I say that cold can be dealt with, there are ways to get warm. But heat cannot always be dealt with. Put clothing on to keep warm, layers, wool, silk. You can have silk and other things on for wearing in the heat, but they don’t KEEP you cool when it’s 80 degrees. They only feel alright on your skin and your brain whigs out from the heat.
So Summer, Air Conditioning is a friend. But became a foe in our home when my allergies went through the roof in 2003. Turned it off and things cleared up. 
So since then we’ve lived au’naturel. It’s fine, like today, if we used the air system, it’d be a useless Heat Pump, and that doesn’t work once near freezing, it can’t pull any heat out of the air. So we’ve learned to live in a cooler house during the Winter and it’s mostly fine. Cloudy days are the worst when it’s cooler. What’s cold in this house? Inside, below 50 is cool. 60 is really nice.
Autumn, and Spring, are lovely in a natural air house. Nighttime in the Summer can be grand, but some nights are just stagnant and worse than that. Mostly though, in Georgia, Summer is hot, but nights are cooler, cool enough to be what gets one through the day, just to live for the night.
Those days are coming. It’s January. It’ll just be another month before some of the Spring flowers begin to come out. Trees will start to swell their buds, and the air will sing with the coming of Spring. That pulse can be felt in January, yes even on such a cold January day.
We are an Early Spring region. A Long Growing Season region. A very temperate climate. Well, except for Summer. See the lovely year round stuff keeps us Georgians happy to put up with Summer, for the lovely Spring, Wondrous Winter, and Awesome Autumn. Summer is bad and good. Thunderstorms are great. Melting hot days are not. But those nights are worth it. Ceiling fans are useful, but not worth a dime on those hot stagnant nights.
Oh what a wierd post this is. I had no objective to write this stuff, it just flowed out. You know how opposites attract, and extremes compare, etc.
Well anyhow, cold days like this are nice to sleep in on. And that we did today. We did miss church, and that’s easier to do on such a cold day, since staying in the house at all means we need to burn a fire. Besides that I’m sniffly allergic these last couple of days, and that’s miserable to go anywhere like that. Cold cold and baths for everyone didn’t happen on Saturday night, and Sunday morning was too cold and we’d just have had 20 minutes to get ready and go …
So day of this and we are tuckered out and just stayed home with the homefires burning. Nice, but we do miss going to church on such times.
No eggs again today. [None yesterday: Jan 22 
]
Total Eggs: 0
Don’t blame them today. It’s COLD! It was 19 degrees this morning when we finally got out of bed. Too cold to get up early. We were up by 9:30am. Wind chill was 7 degrees. Windy Cold day.
How would you like to be a hen in the yard on a day like that, and be expected to lay an egg? I let them off the hook. JUST for today.
In our CONTINUING effort to organize … we took the center stacking unit out of our master closet and put it in the long closet in the room the two boys share. It’s a regular closet, just a double-long type. Our master closet is a small walk-in. All our closets were fitted out with wire shelving as part of the builders package. We do not like them.
We have found the new Closet Maid Completions at Lowe’s and plan on using some of those pieces in our master closet, when we can afford to start changing things out.
For now, removing the one piece from ours gives us MORE walk-in space and that’s grand. We can now actually stand in and see our clothing hanging on the sides of the closet easily. There is room then too to fit baskets on the floor and not have to trip over stuff … laundry, etc.
The boys closet then, is more useful. For us, that piece in our master closet was a nuisance at best. Sure it held stuff, but wasn’t used rightly and we just couldn’t figure out how to make it useful for us.
For the boys, they each get two shelves to hold pants, socks, undies, t-shirts, etc. Frees up hanging space where the pants used to go. Free’s up all drawer space in the dresser in OUR room.
Eventually we plan on putting in a whole closet organizing system for them too, but for now it’s an improvement with something that was annoying for us, so it’s a win-win.
Another helpful thing is that Frank moved the refridgerator to the other side of the kitchen for me last night. It’s on the side that USED to be the eat-in side …which was ineffectual for us, and I always have wanted to flip the kitchen around and do a few other things. Phase one of this was last year, we swapped places with the fridge and stove. Frank moved the electricity for it. That felt better. It was only a partial feel-right. The fridge had originally faced the backyard. I didn’t like it. Garage door was to the left if you were standing in front of the fridge looking at the fridge. It was down several feet, but was a walkway really. Whole counter next to it has suffered the same “seems like a walkway space” area fate.
When we first moved in, it seemed the kitchen was large. We soon found out it was a glorified galley kitchen. Take the garage door measurements out of the width of the kitchen, and it’s a tight squeeze galley.
So since moving the fridge I determined it would definitely feel more right at the opposite end of the room, which would mean it would face the absolute opposite way, looking down the room to the end where the door is.
We haven’t set down any plans on paper yet, but plan on removing all the cabinets and putting them elsewhere, rebuilding what needs that, new stuff where we need it. New countertops for sure. New sink too.
It’ll mean moving the plumbing and so the sink location will be around where the French Doors currently are. We’ll put sliding doors where the sink now is, there abouts. Not exactly there, but near, same as the sink near where the French Doors are now, not exactly there.
The stove then will be on a new portion of cabinet/counter, that extends into the kitchen. It’ll be a peninsula, bar on one side, stove and counter on the other. Hoping to create a true good triangular work space with proper spacing between the elements that count. A kitchen that has NO walkthrough. AMEN!
So were are partway there. The stove is in the middle of the room, sort of, hugging the sidewall at it’s back … transition means we don’t mind things being in wierd places. So I’ve cooked there since I moved it there to clean under it sometime after swapping places with the fridge before, and I left it there for a cooking session, and loved the position, it felt great. So it’s stayed there ever since
Now the fridge is in the right general area. I still have stuff to move out of the end of the kitchen, where my bookcases and stuff have been, what I’ve been TRYING to organize for a few months now …
Once that’s cleared out, then I’ll put the small kitchen table that’s been a desk more often than a kitchen table, next to the fridge, and it’ll simulate countertop for a bit.
Our objective is to get a great kitchen, that works. It’ll have room at the sliding door end for a nice round table, for instance. It’ll have plenty of room really. It’ll just have built in good function with all we do, and it’ll also open up into the room next to it, which will increase light into THAT room, thank goodness, and just be a really nice main floor, finally.
We will install wood flooring too. All of this we hope to do on a shoestring, doing as much of the work as we can ourselves, and that includes the cabinets and installing anything new.
I plan on keeping the ones we already have, repainting them, and painting the interior for the first time too. They have always been untreated inside, and white enamel on the outside.
They will be white inside, with buttercream top cabinets, and a rustic blue distressed finish on the bottom cabinets. Countertops will be some sort of buttery color. Bullnosed edges. Maybe tile backsplash. And new will be a white Cast-iron deep double bowled sink and new faucet too.
We need a new dishwasher. We had to junk our old one already. We want a new stove too. That will come in time. I’d also like a veggie sink somewhere.
So that’s our doings. Not that we are doing much. Just still de-cluttering and mostly dreaming of the changes, with just moving that old fridge finally. :laugh:
Total Eggs: 0
Frank and I just went out and checked for eggs, and there were none. That was 1:00 PM.
The weather is rather nasty. It’s foggy/hazy very wet mist all the way to the ground, with everything coated with a light wet film of water. The air is supposedly 37 with a feels like of 33. It’s biting to the bone cold feeling, but mild at the same point as I went out in my thermal cotton long sleeve dress, thin socks and slip on shoes. So if I had been dressed for about freezing I wouldn’t have been so cold, well maybe. The only cold thing about me now since being in for several minutes is cold toes and cold fingers.
I’ll go out armed with better warming clothing and check later, well sooner than later. I’m hoping for eggs at 1:10 and 2pm, which would be an hour later each respectively from yesterdays egg layings. I’m not SURE we’ll get them, but hoping. Day before that we had three white eggs and a brown egg. Every other day layers would mean at least a white egg and a brown egg today, if not more. I assume that the white eggs of yesterday are from the same hens as laid on the 4 egg day, as One of the timings matches up with that theory — not both, but then who knows what they are doing out there!