Jenyfer Matthews

I took my daughter to Ohio this weekend for a tennis tournament and what a surprise – it snowed! I’m really beginning to think that I’m jinxed. Everywhere I go there is a freak storm.

It all started back in November. I took my daughter and her doubles partner to a tournament in Ohio and what happened as we were driving home – a freak thunderstorm hit our area, knocking down trees and power lines all over town and particularly in my neighborhood. How many snowstorms did I drive into and through in December and January? I lost count. There was even freezing rain and snow in St. Louis the weekend I was there which is not all that common there.

I know that a more reasonable explanation is that I tend to travel every couple of weeks which also seems to be Mother Nature’s pattern for throwing a new storm at the Midwest, but you can see how a girl might start to get a little paranoid.

The roads were terrible in NE Ohio yesterday morning when I had to get out to get my daughter to her tournament.

The roads that had been plowed were bad enough and it is a lot hillier in northeast Ohio than I remember it being when I lived there!

Just trying to keep it on the wide, flat spot between the trees!

By the time we were done for the day (and the weekend) the roads were dry and clear so I took advantage and drove home before it could start snowing again… or sleeting… or maybe raining and then freezing. If it isn’t one thing these days, it’s another…

The pie I made on Wednesday was delicious – even my son, who is not a fan of pie, had a piece.

I only made a couple of changes to the recipe I linked to previously. I didn’t melt the butter, I diced 4T and dotted it on top of the filling and I didn’t brush the crust with butter either. Also, I added a bit more than a half cup of pomegranate seeds because I had some that needed to be used up and they were the same color as the other berries (how is that for a reason??) and I added a bit of salt and some cinnamon to the filling. Also, though I initially followed the instructions for the baking temperature of the pie, it was not getting done even after the full time so I bumped the temperature up to 400F and baked it 30 more minutes. That did the trick.

Winter is an excellent time to sit inside and read a good book. As it happens I got a couple of good books for my birthday. Actual, physical books made of paper One of the books is The Wind Through the Keyhole, volume 4.5 of a series of books called The Dark Tower by Stephen King. King wrote The Wind Through the Keyhole a few years after he had completed the series and somehow I had forgotten about the book until recently.

I love Stephen King’s writing. So many people think that he writes horror, and I suppose that he does, but he also writes books that are more fantasy based and with themes of quests. Sometimes they include scary elements that make you fear for the characters involved but all the best books include tension of one sort or another. The Dark Tower series is like an old-west fantasy quest.

When I got The Wind Through the Keyhole I wanted to start reading it right away. Then I started trying to think when I last read the books that preceded this one in the series. Ten years? I started to read it anyway because I was impatient to get started but quickly realized that I didn’t remember enough of details of the previous book to just jump in. So I picked up the previous book, which itself began with a summary of the preceding three books. And realized that I was probably going to have to just suck it up and start at the beginning of the series again (which I used to routinely do every time he released a new volume).

Which only bums me out because I want to read the new story *now*. And ironically, The Wind Through the Keyhole starts with the characters huddled in a stone building waiting out a “starkblast”, an intense and sudden winter storm. (Creepy!) But I might as well start the series over again because not only do I love it and want to enjoy the new book as much as possible by refreshing my memory of the details of the storyline, I’m certainly not chomping at the bit to spend time outside at the moment anyway…

The sun is shining outside but it is windy and C-O-L-D. It was only 12F here the last I checked and we are supposed to get a bit more snow tonight. Just what we need.

I’ve been staying inside a lot lately – imagine that! And all this cold weather has me in the mood to bake. Anything to be near my oven! I decided to get a little bit creative and try something new : raspberry rhubarb pie. I loved the strawberry rhubarb pie I made, so how much of a risk can this be? Since I have both raspberries and rhubarb from my garden in the freezer it seemed an obvious choice. Hoarding either the raspberries or the rhubarb won’t make summer roll around any faster (at all!?)

In spite of the weather, the stores around here have bathing suits on display. Really???

I have too much to do today as usual but I woke up energized and ready to take as much as I possibly could on my list today. I’m going to take advantage of the focus and drive while I can. This song is my theme today – and I hope this week:

We in mid-Michigan are currently experiencing rain, snow, and temperatures that have allowed some of the accumulated snow to thaw a bit followed by temperatures dropping again to turn all that thawing into sheets of ice. Add to the above wind advisories. It all adds up to another day spent huddling next to my space heater.

For a change of pace I am not traveling anywhere this weekend thank goodness.

We are supposed to get a bit more snow over the weekend. The biggest issue lately is where to put all this snow. I had a notice from our mailman that we needed to clear the area in front of our mailbox or he wasn’t going to deliver our mail anymore (the area that the city plow blocked). I did what I could but ran into problems with where to put what I cleared and the foot of solid ice I found under the accumulation. Got another notice the next day that said “do some more”. I guess I finally did enough because I’m still getting my mail.

But for those of us in the snowier states this year, snow disposal is becoming a serious issue as the snow just keeps coming. I have been thinking about it and I think it just might work : truck at least some of this snow out west where they need to replenish their groundwater.

Think about it – cities could load the snow up into trucks and start taking it west. As the snow melts, the volume would decrease and the water could be transferred into tanker trucks. It might sound like a costly way to remove snow upfront but could it really cost so much more than cleaning up the flood damage that will almost certainly occur when all this snow begins to melt?

And it will melt at some point and there is no guarantee that it will be a slow melt.

They won’t need to send it all out west – we do need to keep some here for our own groundwater needs – but in instances like this I think we could certainly afford to be generous and send what – about 40-50%? Think about it – winter shows no signs of abating just yet.

Who’s with me?

My daughter ended up playing and winning the last two matches of her bracket at her weekend tournament on Monday morning – yay for her! Of course that meant that we didn’t end up finishing for the day until nearly 2pm. I had read the weather forecast for my drive back to Michigan. Even if it hadn’t been so late in the day to start a ten hour drive, I did not want a repeat of Friday’s drive. Ugh.

So instead I decided that as long as we were in St. Louis perhaps we should see something unique to the city – the St. Louis Arch. I wasn’t aware that you could actually take a car to the top of it until I was looking up the address of how to get there. It is roughly 63 stories tall and on a clear day you can see about 30 miles.

I had my scrap paper with the directions written on it since my GPS never did figure out where I was, but once the kids saw how tall it was from a distance, they were not at all interested in going up in it! Since that was the case, I decided that there was no reason to make a stop at all then. We just admired it from a distance and then crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois.

I ended up driving as far as Indianapolis before it started to get dark and somewhat slippery and I decided to just call it a day and find a hotel. It was a good decision – yesterday when I got back on the road not only had the snow plows done their thing but the sun was actually so bright I had to wear my sunglasses! The worst roads of my trip were actually the ones in my neighborhood leading up to my house.

Home again, home again… for now anyway…

The good news is that overall the tennis tournament is going well for my daughter – this one is a three day event and it is always good news when you make it through to the final rounds on the last day of the event.

The bad news is that I’m in St. Louis, Missouri and have to drive back to Michigan and the weather is bad any route I look at. The Indianapolis route was so awful on the way here on Friday that I thought I might just go back through Chicago on my way home. The forecast today is calling for a wintery mix from St. Louis to Indianapolis, which isn’t great, but for an 80% chance of 4-6 inches of snow in Chicago which is worse.

Indianapolis it is!

But before I can drive anywhere, my daughter has another tennis match this morning at 9am. If that one goes well she’d play again at 11:30am. It could be after lunch by the time she is finished and I’ve been up since 3am (couldn’t sleep ugh) and I lose and hour going from Central to Eastern time.

Nope, not going to make it all the way home today…

It’s been a tennis kind of week – we’ve had our visiting tennis pro all week playing in the professional tournament the local club is hosting so we’ve been watching tennis tennis tennis all week. Watching such high level tennis has been pretty great and today I loaded up the car bright and early to take my daughter to a tennis tournament she’s playing in… in St. Louis, Missouri.

It would have been a long drive from Michigan no matter how you looked at it. I decided to be clever and drive down to Indianapolis and then head west so that I could avoid traffic in Chicago. Joke was on me however. First, my GPS wasn’t cooperating – it simply would not recognize either the address for the tennis center or for our hotel. The best I could do was to put in “St. Louis” as my end point. Second, I hit a snowstorm in Indiana. There were cars off the road all over the place, plus multiple accidents. There hadn’t been any plows through the downtown area and because we had to slow down so much I actually almost got stuck! I didn’t mind slowing down, but it was no fun sitting at a dead stop for about an hour because of an accident. I must have lost about three hours drive time in Indianapolis alone. So much for avoiding traffic delays in Chicago…

As for the GPS issue, in the end I went all old-school and looked at a paper map at a rest area – and what do you know, I found my hotel. Imagine that

But neither malfunctioning GPS-s, snowstorms, or traffic delays I will get my girl to her tennis tournament. Now it’s time to relax a bit – right after I look up and write down the directions to the tennis center!

I scavenged a bunch of logs back in Nov / Dec when the people in my neighborhood were cleaning up downed trees and branches from a violent thunderstorm that passed through. Most of the logs I picked up were a manageable size – I can only lift and haul so much after all – but I got a little ambitious with a couple of them.

I’ve been thinking about how to split the two largest logs for a while and since my neck and back feel better than they have in months I decided today was the day to put my ideas to the test. My father suggested that splitting the logs in extremely cold weather might be easiest because any moisture in the log would cause the fibers to expand.

It’s above zero today but not by much. Extreme cold – check!

I don’t actually own an axe – and even if I did I doubt I have the strength to use it effectively. Or the aim – I’d be more likely to clonk myself in the head or chop off my toes. Since I really only had two logs that needed splitting, I decided to use what I do have: a large metal spike I got at an estate sale because I thought it was cool and a small hatchet, also from an estate sale.

Unfortunately the log did not immediately give up and neatly split in half as I sort of hoped it would. I ended up pounding that spike all the way in to the log. I had a good split going, but it wasn’t quite all the way through and the spike was wedged in tight. Hmmm… what’s a girl to do except pick up the log and Hulk-smash it on to the floor until it splits?

What do you know – that worked! And the log only bounced up and hit me in the shin once.

The second log wasn’t quite as thick and cooperated a bit faster. I can only assume that now that they are split they will not only burn better but also season a bit faster.

I’m a woman who can grow and can food, sew and quilt, has basic medical knowledge, and can split logs with inadequate tools. I’d be a useful member of any team in the event of a zombie apocalypse

Is having house guests extra work? I suppose they can be, depending on the guest and on your standards of cleanliness for your house. We hosted a professional tennis player last year for the professional tennis tournament that our local club hosts every year and she is coming back this year and due to arrive today. I’m happy about that for a couple of reasons – one, she is a super sweet girl whose company we all really enjoy, and two, it gives not only me, but my family, some motivation to try and keep the house a bit tidier than usual.

She’s only staying a week but I’ll take what I can get.

Having a house guest also forces me to do a bit better on the meal planning. I cook just about every night of the week unless we have a leftover night but some nights I’m more inspired than others. Lucky for me our guest enjoyed my cooking last year so much she was sending me messages for repeats on certain dishes I cooked for her last time. Nothing inspires cooking so much as an appreciative audience.

I hope the cold isn’t too much of a shock for her however – she is from Florida. Southern Florida! She’ll probably find it cold inside of our house let alone outside with the -20F windchills. Ironically, last winter wasn’t so bad however she was here during the biggest winter storm that we got which dumped a foot of snow on us at once. We have more snow than that piled up now plus the bitter temperatures – hmmm…I wonder if she’ll come back next year?