You Know It’s Cold When:
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
You wake up in the morning, open your eyes and the first thing you see is your breath
You’re worried that the monkeys coming towards you on the road are planning to mug you for your down vest.
You don’t need to put things in the refrigerator to keep them from spoiling; the counter does just fine.
The toilet outside on the balcony won’t flush because the pipes have frozen and anyway, sitting on that ice cold seat causes immediate constipation!
Getting dressed involves two pair of long underwear, a long-sleeved t-shirt, a thermal shirt, a bulky pullover, a thick cardigan, a down vest, leggings, an ankle length heavy wool skirt, two pairs of wool socks, a neck scarf, a knit cap and gloves. And that’s for INDOORS! And you’ve been sleeping in the bottom three layers under pajamas because you’re not about to get naked in this weather!
Pursuant to the above item about getting naked, you find all sorts of excuses to put off taking a shower and washing your hair more than once a week because: 1. Nobody’s going to smell you through all those layers. 2. Natural oils are good for conditioning your hair - let it steep awhile longer. 3. You’ve heard that the Tibetan nomads take a bath every year - whether they need it or not. 4. Catching pneumonia or becoming hypothermic is probably bad for your health.
Your toothpaste, sitting on the ledge by the outside sink is solid enough to pass for a new flavour of Ben and Jerry’s.
You are so deeply attached to your hot water bottle that you know you’ll probably encounter it in the Bardo where it will leak and be full of something cold and nasty. (that’s a Tibetan Buddhist joke for my non Buddhist readers.)
Even though you KNOW it will cause you to look just like an avatar of The Great Pumpkin, you consider making yourself a pullover out of some bulky orange wool because 1. it would be a quick knit. 2. It would be quite warm. 3. You have enough bulky orange wool in your stash for a really big cozy pullover because it was on sale cheap so you bought every ball they had (that’s a knitting joke for my non-knitting readers.)
The cats have bald patches from laying in the coals of the fireplace to keep warm.
What really sucks about the recent, long-lasting power outages is that it’s too dark in the kitchen to knit in front of the fire and too cold to knit anywhere there’s daylight.
A trip to town means doing a head count of the oldsters and invalids and checking in on anyone unaccounted for to make sure they’re okay.
Yes indeedy, we are in the cold months my friends, when the mountain peaks get their caps of snow for the season and the soccer field and horse pasture glisten with frost in the pale morning sunlight. The indoor temps run 5 or 6 degrees at night and maybe top out at 9 or 10 in the middle of the day if the sun is shining. I have no way to measure the outdoor temperatures here, but certainly below freezing. Even the lower elevations got snow last Saturday, which is quite unusual. It didn’t stick, but it sure made the monkeys unhappy for an afternoon.
I have a lot to catch up on here and in other areas. A lot. We’ve had serious power outages and, when there is electricity, the Internet connection has been pretty dodgy, so I am behinder and behinder at anything requiring technology. I have many thank you letters to write to all the lovely, wonderful people who have made donations to the Medical Emergency Fund in the past month. You are the people who make the world go round - not just for me and my household, but for the sick ones, the elderly and the kids who are being helped. I may not have posted a lot here since Christmas, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy. A lot has happened and I’m hoping to share more pictures with you soon, when the Internet signal permits uploading files bigger than a picture of a pea.
The dogs survived. That sounds so… anticlimactic, doesn’t it. But it’s a great thing, a very great thing. The three dogs that we were consulted on (never mentioned Tiger, did I, that’s another story) - the two older ones who stayed here and the puppy whose chances of surviving distemper were something like 20%, are all back to their homes, eating, drinking, tail-wagging and living their lives. Not all as before - Spot has some pretty serious coordination problems as his souvenir of distemper, but he can eat and drink and eliminate, he’s happy and at home back in his little doghouse on the top of the mountain. If he gets no worse over the months, he’ll have a reasonable life taken care of by the nuns. Whitey is pretty well his old self again, getting into things and more since he’s now discovered a whole new world of edibles with us (whoops!) and Tiger, the puppy? Well, you’d never even know he had distemper. He’s a champ!
There’s lots of people stories too and I will try to tell them as I can. If you’ve been waiting to hear back from me, please be patient. I’m literally a month behind on e-mail and scheduling and that’s with handling all the urgent business I can manage during the hours when we have power and internet. I will just keep slogging away and hopefully, won’t miss anything critical. If something IS critical, email me again with URGENT in the subject line and I’ll do my best to prioritize your query or request. To the rest, remember that patience is one of the Six Paramitas or Perfections of Buddhism and this gives you a marvelous opportunity to practice!
For myself, I’m trying to practice the Paramita of Perseverance. One day at a time and all that while trying to maintain my sense of humour when the lights go out or the plumbing freezes. Sometimes it really is funny. I mean, standing on the balcony in the dark, stomping on my frozen toothpaste, trying to get enough out to brush my teeth is pretty comical. Smelling the aroma of singed cat fur wafting through the kitchen is pretty good too. The really bone-chilling cold only lasts a couple of months where we’re at. By the end of February it will begin to warm up to shirt sleeve weather. By late March we’ll be overly warm and packing away the thermals and hot water bottles until next year. The best times of year around here are October and November, February and March. At least my internal thermometer thinks so. I have a preference for cool over warm and those are the months of mild days and cool evenings. If all goes as planned, we’ll see you in the States during April and May. More on that schedule as it develops!
