Happy Holidays!!
Before we get into our year, we’d like to ask those who receive this Christmas update a favor. Pro bono, we have developed a website for the Letcher County, Kentucky, Planning Commission that describes the good things about Letcher County. Its purpose is to bring tourism, retirees, and jobs to Letcher County by making the nation aware of county assets. You will find it here (or directly at www.whyletchercounty.org). The trick, of course, is how to assure that people from elsewhere find the site. We would greatly appreciate your help in getting the word out, sharing the site on your Facebook page, and so on. And we would appreciate any feedback from you on how to make the site more effective.
Now to our year:
It tells you something about the general dullness of our life when the most exciting things that happened to us this past year were weather-related. Especially when the latest event was waking up to rain, to mixed thrills and relief. The southeast has been in a drought all autumn, moving up the scale from minor to moderate to severe to extreme to extraordinary. For the first time I can remember, the humidity was so low (sometimes down in the 20% range) that there wasn’t enough moisture to produce our standard fall morning fogs. And the branch beside the house still hasn’t show any signs of flow in spite of the considerable rain we finally got. While areas further south reached the extraordinary point, we never quite made the last jump, but we had been living with forest fires and smoke for weeks, to the point that every National Guard helicopter in Kentucky seemed to be assigned here to fight fires. When a rain finally reached us that extinguished all the fires and kept us from making that jump to extraordinary, we could not have been more grateful.
By now you will have heard about the tragic conflagration in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, so you will know what the rain potentially saved us from.
On the subject of gratitude, this drought taught us to be grateful for living in the shade of the mountain just behind us to the south. Usually, especially in fall and winter, we are bemoaning the fact that the mountain’s bulk blocks all but two or three hours of sunlight, leaving frosts and snow to linger all day to weeks. This fall that sun-shadow worked to our advantage, because it meant that the soil’s existing moisture and the few sprinkles we did get didn’t burn off in the sun within a few hours, the way they did on the opposite slope.
The second notable weather originated in Alaska. We had a lovely summer, as we always do, but not conducive to good fishing. There was a huge dearth of snow last winter, and very hot weather early. Global warming assured we suffered through multiple days of temperatures in the eighties, records falling by the ripples. Unheard of in our area of Alaska. What snow we did have and counted on to feed the rivers across the summer melted and flooded the rivers early in the season. No snow, high water early in the season, and scarce water later, not a combination devoutly to be wished.
The third weather event took place inside. We rolled in from Alaska at the end of summer to a heat wave and a wall air conditioner that wouldn’t come on. Or, to be precise, one that would come on but not cool the air. It took us more than a week to get a technician to come, and meanwhile we stewed in boiling weather. I don’t think the temperature fell below 75 degrees during that period, even at night. At one point, my Houston sister-in-law assured me that our low would get down to 68 the coming night. When I rose next morning to 78 degrees, I immediately called down threats of floods and locusts on Houston and all its denizens, and threatened zika-carrying mosquitoes.
But there was good news. Appalachian Heating and Cooling arrived at 8 that morning. By 9:30, the air conditioner was working. By ten the house was both cool and dry, we could afford to turn the lights on without jacking up the temperature, I was no longer was sporting an envelope of glowing sweat, and all was good.
It took until 9:30 partly because the technician liked to talk but mostly because he couldn't get the air conditioner out of the wall. Apparently it has become one with the house.
The downside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner was that he therefore couldn't get to the capacitor, which he had tentatively (and correctly, it turned out) diagnosed as the problem part. Finally, he concluded he had to cut a hole in the outside metal case of the unit to get to the capacitor, which he did. We can live with a hole, even if birds, yellow jackets, and vampires take up residence in there, but not with 90-plus degrees, 90-plus humidity, and nothing but fans.
The upside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner is that, since I work directly under the air conditioner, I can now feel reassured it will not burst out of the wall and take out me, my printer, my laptop, and possibly my entire desk.
There is a corollary to this story: When we got back, all our salt, in the shakers and the box, had clumped together. It took a lot of pounding and swearing to get a few stuck-together grains broken off the main mass and out through those little shaker holes.
But after about four hours of cold air inside and a river of extracted humidity draining off the outside of the unit, I figured I would be able to fill the shakers so we could have salt-without-swearing on our wonderful Grainger County (Tennessee, and delicious) tomatoes I’d found the day before.
Hah! Short of peeling the salt out of the box as one three-inch-in-diameter lump, it was clear that no shaker-filling was going to occur. So I consoled myself with the thought that, after a day or two, the salt should have dried out enough to flow. Consolation was succeeded by realism. Chances were, when the salt dried, it would still be one lump. A hard, dry lump that would need a pickaxe and a wood chipper to restore to grains. So salt went on my shopping list.
Salt is not all. When we left, I had a bunch of financial papers to shred (post-income-tax cleanup), and they hadn't done a thing to shred themselves while we’d been gone. One night, while I was sitting in the dark sweating, it occurred to me that I could sweat in front of the shredder, so I hied over there, separated a couple of pages, fired up the shredder, and poked them in. Bad plan. They were so saturated with humidity that they stuck to themselves, stuck to the shredder, jammed up the teeth, and caused the shredder to make noises reminiscent of a whining dog trying to harmonize with the shuddering roar our garbage grinder emits when asked to grind up corn husks. So I stopped. And pried the mess out of the shredder teeth. Determinedly and over a long period. I'm thinking Christmas will be the right timing. That's if the papers don't form a single lump like the salt. I'll send an email around Christmas to report on that.
At that stage, I was beginning to think that the Devil was at work, and that staying here in the summer would be easier than coping with coming back. Clearly, that's what the Devil favors.
Several other notable things happened to us this year. For about 15 years, bears have been coming back into Eastern Kentucky. Being from Alaska, we know about bears and garbage, so a few years ago, as the bears spread, we had a sturdy trash bin made out of 4x4s and ¾-inch plywood, maybe three feet by four feet, with a very heavy hasp and lock. We customarily waited anyway until Sunday night to take our garbage down to the foot of the mountain for a Monday-morning pickup, so we figured we were bear safe. Not so lucky. It’s true the bin held and the lock held, but we went down one Monday morning to discover that the bear had ripped out the entire installation and tossed it ten feet across our driveway. Don’t know whether it was trying to break it open or just frustrated, but either way the results were not good. It was all the two of us and a friend could do to drag it back and reinstall it on its posts, and the lid was intact but permanently warped. So now we don’t take our garbage to the bin until Monday morning, and next spring we will be on the alert for hungry black bears fresh out of hibernation.
One of the other notable events last year was a mishap the with clothes dryer. I (Nina) am an avid thrift store shopper, but I also live in fear of bringing in roaches and bedbugs. I have therefore always dumped the books I bring home from the thrift store into a plastic garbage bag, hosed them generously with an insecticide and let them marinate a week or two. That is less than environmentally ideal, so when I heard that raising their temperature to 120 degrees would kill critters and eggs, I decided to put my latest purchases in the dryer on high for twenty minutes in lieu of spraying. When the timer pinged, I headed downstairs to retrieve the books, looking forward to reading one of them immediately and free of insecticide instead of two weeks later and toxic. Didn’t quite work out as I expected. The heat had melted the glue, and when I opened the dryer door, a huge avalanche of individual pages foamed out and covered me, the lid, and the floor. I had put probably twelve books in there, and now had a multi-thousand-page puzzle in waiting. So don’t do that, or at least rubber band each book beforehand. (I decided to toss the disassembled book leaves, by the way.)
The last notable incident had to do with shuckey beans. I (Nina; Dean can take them or leave them) love shuckey beans. (Some of you may call them leather britches as my father did.) Some autumns, if we get down from Alaska to Kentucky while the weather is still warm enough to dry them out, I string a few up for the winter. Usually, though, I just buy dried shuckeys, a gallon at a time. Every time I do that, I am told that my forty-dollar-a-gallon shuckeys equate to a bushel of fresh beans. But when I cook them, they don’t come close to a bushel, which would overflow every pot I own. The scientific method never deserts a person indoctrinated in it, so this fall, in Kentucky in a heat wave, I decided to buy a bushel of green beans, dry them, and see how many gallons of shuckeys I got. To be sure no one could claim I hadn’t dried them enough, I left them in the sun and heat until they were wizened, crinkly and sharp, and clattered against each other. When they were terminally shrunken and dry, I put them in gallon ziplocs, as full as I could get the ziplocs and still zip them. I got not one gallon, but nearly three gallons, packed as tight as I could. So the next time someone states that a gallon of dried shuckeys equals a bushel of fresh beans, I am going to ask them, “Uh, have you actually ever measured?”
Have a great new year.
Dean and Nina
Before we get into our year, we’d like to ask those who receive this Christmas update a favor. Pro bono, we have developed a website for the Letcher County, Kentucky, Planning Commission that describes the good things about Letcher County. Its purpose is to bring tourism, retirees, and jobs to Letcher County by making the nation aware of county assets. You will find it here (or directly at www.whyletchercounty.org). The trick, of course, is how to assure that people from elsewhere find the site. We would greatly appreciate your help in getting the word out, sharing the site on your Facebook page, and so on. And we would appreciate any feedback from you on how to make the site more effective.
Now to our year:
It tells you something about the general dullness of our life when the most exciting things that happened to us this past year were weather-related. Especially when the latest event was waking up to rain, to mixed thrills and relief. The southeast has been in a drought all autumn, moving up the scale from minor to moderate to severe to extreme to extraordinary. For the first time I can remember, the humidity was so low (sometimes down in the 20% range) that there wasn’t enough moisture to produce our standard fall morning fogs. And the branch beside the house still hasn’t show any signs of flow in spite of the considerable rain we finally got. While areas further south reached the extraordinary point, we never quite made the last jump, but we had been living with forest fires and smoke for weeks, to the point that every National Guard helicopter in Kentucky seemed to be assigned here to fight fires. When a rain finally reached us that extinguished all the fires and kept us from making that jump to extraordinary, we could not have been more grateful.
By now you will have heard about the tragic conflagration in Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, so you will know what the rain potentially saved us from.
On the subject of gratitude, this drought taught us to be grateful for living in the shade of the mountain just behind us to the south. Usually, especially in fall and winter, we are bemoaning the fact that the mountain’s bulk blocks all but two or three hours of sunlight, leaving frosts and snow to linger all day to weeks. This fall that sun-shadow worked to our advantage, because it meant that the soil’s existing moisture and the few sprinkles we did get didn’t burn off in the sun within a few hours, the way they did on the opposite slope.
The second notable weather originated in Alaska. We had a lovely summer, as we always do, but not conducive to good fishing. There was a huge dearth of snow last winter, and very hot weather early. Global warming assured we suffered through multiple days of temperatures in the eighties, records falling by the ripples. Unheard of in our area of Alaska. What snow we did have and counted on to feed the rivers across the summer melted and flooded the rivers early in the season. No snow, high water early in the season, and scarce water later, not a combination devoutly to be wished.
The third weather event took place inside. We rolled in from Alaska at the end of summer to a heat wave and a wall air conditioner that wouldn’t come on. Or, to be precise, one that would come on but not cool the air. It took us more than a week to get a technician to come, and meanwhile we stewed in boiling weather. I don’t think the temperature fell below 75 degrees during that period, even at night. At one point, my Houston sister-in-law assured me that our low would get down to 68 the coming night. When I rose next morning to 78 degrees, I immediately called down threats of floods and locusts on Houston and all its denizens, and threatened zika-carrying mosquitoes.
But there was good news. Appalachian Heating and Cooling arrived at 8 that morning. By 9:30, the air conditioner was working. By ten the house was both cool and dry, we could afford to turn the lights on without jacking up the temperature, I was no longer was sporting an envelope of glowing sweat, and all was good.
It took until 9:30 partly because the technician liked to talk but mostly because he couldn't get the air conditioner out of the wall. Apparently it has become one with the house.
The downside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner was that he therefore couldn't get to the capacitor, which he had tentatively (and correctly, it turned out) diagnosed as the problem part. Finally, he concluded he had to cut a hole in the outside metal case of the unit to get to the capacitor, which he did. We can live with a hole, even if birds, yellow jackets, and vampires take up residence in there, but not with 90-plus degrees, 90-plus humidity, and nothing but fans.
The upside of a one-with-the-house air conditioner is that, since I work directly under the air conditioner, I can now feel reassured it will not burst out of the wall and take out me, my printer, my laptop, and possibly my entire desk.
There is a corollary to this story: When we got back, all our salt, in the shakers and the box, had clumped together. It took a lot of pounding and swearing to get a few stuck-together grains broken off the main mass and out through those little shaker holes.
But after about four hours of cold air inside and a river of extracted humidity draining off the outside of the unit, I figured I would be able to fill the shakers so we could have salt-without-swearing on our wonderful Grainger County (Tennessee, and delicious) tomatoes I’d found the day before.
Hah! Short of peeling the salt out of the box as one three-inch-in-diameter lump, it was clear that no shaker-filling was going to occur. So I consoled myself with the thought that, after a day or two, the salt should have dried out enough to flow. Consolation was succeeded by realism. Chances were, when the salt dried, it would still be one lump. A hard, dry lump that would need a pickaxe and a wood chipper to restore to grains. So salt went on my shopping list.
Salt is not all. When we left, I had a bunch of financial papers to shred (post-income-tax cleanup), and they hadn't done a thing to shred themselves while we’d been gone. One night, while I was sitting in the dark sweating, it occurred to me that I could sweat in front of the shredder, so I hied over there, separated a couple of pages, fired up the shredder, and poked them in. Bad plan. They were so saturated with humidity that they stuck to themselves, stuck to the shredder, jammed up the teeth, and caused the shredder to make noises reminiscent of a whining dog trying to harmonize with the shuddering roar our garbage grinder emits when asked to grind up corn husks. So I stopped. And pried the mess out of the shredder teeth. Determinedly and over a long period. I'm thinking Christmas will be the right timing. That's if the papers don't form a single lump like the salt. I'll send an email around Christmas to report on that.
At that stage, I was beginning to think that the Devil was at work, and that staying here in the summer would be easier than coping with coming back. Clearly, that's what the Devil favors.
Several other notable things happened to us this year. For about 15 years, bears have been coming back into Eastern Kentucky. Being from Alaska, we know about bears and garbage, so a few years ago, as the bears spread, we had a sturdy trash bin made out of 4x4s and ¾-inch plywood, maybe three feet by four feet, with a very heavy hasp and lock. We customarily waited anyway until Sunday night to take our garbage down to the foot of the mountain for a Monday-morning pickup, so we figured we were bear safe. Not so lucky. It’s true the bin held and the lock held, but we went down one Monday morning to discover that the bear had ripped out the entire installation and tossed it ten feet across our driveway. Don’t know whether it was trying to break it open or just frustrated, but either way the results were not good. It was all the two of us and a friend could do to drag it back and reinstall it on its posts, and the lid was intact but permanently warped. So now we don’t take our garbage to the bin until Monday morning, and next spring we will be on the alert for hungry black bears fresh out of hibernation.
One of the other notable events last year was a mishap the with clothes dryer. I (Nina) am an avid thrift store shopper, but I also live in fear of bringing in roaches and bedbugs. I have therefore always dumped the books I bring home from the thrift store into a plastic garbage bag, hosed them generously with an insecticide and let them marinate a week or two. That is less than environmentally ideal, so when I heard that raising their temperature to 120 degrees would kill critters and eggs, I decided to put my latest purchases in the dryer on high for twenty minutes in lieu of spraying. When the timer pinged, I headed downstairs to retrieve the books, looking forward to reading one of them immediately and free of insecticide instead of two weeks later and toxic. Didn’t quite work out as I expected. The heat had melted the glue, and when I opened the dryer door, a huge avalanche of individual pages foamed out and covered me, the lid, and the floor. I had put probably twelve books in there, and now had a multi-thousand-page puzzle in waiting. So don’t do that, or at least rubber band each book beforehand. (I decided to toss the disassembled book leaves, by the way.)
The last notable incident had to do with shuckey beans. I (Nina; Dean can take them or leave them) love shuckey beans. (Some of you may call them leather britches as my father did.) Some autumns, if we get down from Alaska to Kentucky while the weather is still warm enough to dry them out, I string a few up for the winter. Usually, though, I just buy dried shuckeys, a gallon at a time. Every time I do that, I am told that my forty-dollar-a-gallon shuckeys equate to a bushel of fresh beans. But when I cook them, they don’t come close to a bushel, which would overflow every pot I own. The scientific method never deserts a person indoctrinated in it, so this fall, in Kentucky in a heat wave, I decided to buy a bushel of green beans, dry them, and see how many gallons of shuckeys I got. To be sure no one could claim I hadn’t dried them enough, I left them in the sun and heat until they were wizened, crinkly and sharp, and clattered against each other. When they were terminally shrunken and dry, I put them in gallon ziplocs, as full as I could get the ziplocs and still zip them. I got not one gallon, but nearly three gallons, packed as tight as I could. So the next time someone states that a gallon of dried shuckeys equals a bushel of fresh beans, I am going to ask them, “Uh, have you actually ever measured?”
Have a great new year.
Dean and Nina
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