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I was having a lovely conversation with a friend via IM last night around 7:15 p.m. when suddenly the power went out. We get a lot of power outages out here in the sticks, but this was particularly inconvenient because we were just starting in on a cold snap and our ancient converted schoolhouse is heated with electric space heaters in most rooms, but also, luckily, an old square wood burning stove in the kitchen addition.

Anyway, so I got offline (man, do I love that UPS battery backup out here!) after my last words to my friend were something like, “Oh, *%$#@! Power Outage – Gotta go!” Turned everything off, and reported the outage to the power company – I’m always the first one to report – I never wait to see if they’re coming back on quickly because they never do. After a while they called back and said they’d have crews out between 10:59 p.m. and 1:59.

What I didn’t know is that they meant 1:59 in the afternoon the next day because apparently they had to wait until they could get a helicopter out to check out the lines in the daytime. That’s what they TOLD me at least – John’s convinced they just didn’t want to come out in the dark and bitter cold – heh. John brought another load of wood with him when he came home, so we had fuel at least. And we brought the turtles inside too, lest they get encased in solid ice in their little outdoor pond – they’re still pretty immobile in a large plastic container in the hallway.

But let me tell you, there’s only so much one wood-burning stove can do in an ancient, uninsulated schoolhouse with old wavy uninsulated glass windows when the temperature drops below freezing. We had to keep the water flowing in the plumbing but the kitchen pipes STILL froze (they’re thawed now at the moment – no bursting) AND of course, you have to keep feeding the wood-burning fireplace or it stops being warm. So we basically did that all night – I got about an hour of sleep and John got a few, but that was it.

And… the low temp hit 12 degrees this morning at 5 a.m. outside. EEEK! I won’t even tell you how cold it got in other areas of the house – you wouldn’t believe me. So after the sun rose we went into town to do errands that we’d planned on doing (since we still didn’t have power) and just got back around 2 and the power was on finally. Let me tell you we came home with another ton of wood and a nice bottle of wine too. 😉

Anyway – I’m writing this because I haven’t really slept since 7 a.m. yesterday, I drank two large cokes while in town on errands, so I’m exhausted and wired at the same time – LOL. (Which you’d think would be a good combination for coming up with Out of Context Quotes, but it isn’t – those still require a LITTLE sense!) So… I’m going to stop typing now and take a deep breath, and then probably collapse while John builds another fire – go John go!

Created a new series of designs for our food weblog & shop site (which we’ve been giving less attention than it deserves lately – tsk tsk), based on types of wines. Since John and I are getting more comfortable with what kinds of wines taste like what, and what we prefer, etc., I thought I’d have a little fun with them.

“Quick! Merlot Me!” is the design for Merlot lovers – 14 other varieties are also available: Cabernet, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, Riesling, Pinot Noir, Pinot Grigio, Champagne, Chianti, Sauvignon Blanc, Bordeaux, Chablis, Burgundy, Chenin Blanc, and Port. They come on many varieties and colors of t-shirts, long sleeved tshirts, sweatshirts, bags, hats, and even teddy bears, etc. (These designs are also included in our food follies shop that has a lot of different people’s designs in it as well as ours: Food Follies Gift Shop – in the wine section naturally.)

Also, have another Celtic art design in the works, so stay tuned for that – hopefully it’ll be postable sometime in the coming week.

Happy New Year All! November and December were busy this year (in the tradition of dramatic understatement) for various reasons – I see I only posted ONCE in December even! So I either apologize for not posting or apologize for starting once again – heh.

One of the best gifts I received was a new chair for my computer desk! The old one was starting to squeak/shriek and moan when you even looked at it like you wanted to sit down on it – I think it knew that chances were good it could DIE at each subsequent sitting. So now I have a Sealy Posturepedic chair with beige microfiber upholstery (the kind you can ‘draw’ by swishing the nap this way and that with your finger, although they left that out of the manual for some reason) that’s totally comfy!

And thank John I have a comfortable chair because although MOST of my weblogs transfered over from the old blogger to the new blogger (with google account login now), our Out of Context Quotes one did NOT. Also luckily, we published it on our own site instead of blogspot so we had our own archives to rebuild it from. So I’m now about halfway through reinputing 400+ quotes into a new blog format – up to “With a steady supply of the undead you could set up a hot tub with bubble jets.” *grin* Also on the plus side, the XML/RSS feed that was screwy before seems to be fixed as well – good for all of you who have been putting OOCQ on your own website using the scripts on the site.

Speaking of chocolate (weren’t we?), raspberry dark chocolate kisses are very tasty, but you can only eat one per sitting or they are WAY too much. Also, you must keep them isolated from other foil-wrapped chocolates lest their aroma overwhelm and confuse the senses into thinking that ALL are raspberry dark chocolate – very subversive.

I think that’s enough for a new year’s day melange post!

Conveniently enough, Tuesday’s Topic is the weather! Temperatures fell to about 20 freezing degrees last night. There was frost everywhere when we woke up and the bird bath was frozen solid. (Keeping in mind that we’re in Central California!) And even though we have the small turtle pool covered with a solid plastic cover, there was still a layer of ice on top about 1/3 of an inch thick sealing the top of the water! The turtles were fine, hunkered down under the ice, and not moving much, all pulled into their shells. (Wouldn’t you be?) Funny thing is though, we broke the covering ice twice in the morning and then once again and I had to really shatter it and fish out all the ice chunks so it wouldn’t freeze again! This is probably the reason we wear turtle necks when it gets cold? (sorry)