Life Away from Civilization

Our neighbor's cows.

We have two eagles who live nearby.

Simon loves his new flying site!

Hoar frost came nearly every night in January.

I took a picture of Orien--although it is hard to tell.

We moved in mid-December, Simon started work December 31st and it was not until the end of February that I got a job. I was hired to work as a receptionist for the Chewelah Community Health Center. It is a fast-paced medical clinic with a few providers and quite a friendly staff. 

For all of January and most of February I was at home...all day long. I did projects, cooked lots of yummy food and was a very good wife (I had dinner ready when Simon got home) for two entire months!

I took many short walks (pleasant when the sun was out which was not very often or for very long at a time), finished my quilt top (now I just have the bottom left to do and to bind it), worked on archiving cassette tapes for my mom (still working on this because we probably have over a hundred tapes), and compiling letters and pictures I wrote and having them printed in book form). 

I'm excited to actually meet people in the community and have enjoyed my job for the past month. It is fun to start to become part of the community. 

This is a small community where people do tend to know each other and have connections in many different ways. This is easily seen by an experience Simon and I had two months ago. On his way home from his night on call at 6:30 a.m. Simon found a huge wandering white Great Pyrenees on the highway. He picked him up and brought him home. We put an ad on Craigslist and then went out to the highway and knocked on a couple doors near where he'd picked him up. One lady took our number and called a few people. About 7 hour later, a lady called. Someone at the Valley store had called her because they'd heard we had a large white dog and hers had run off two days before. We returned Caleb to his mommy and his Great Pyrenees lady-friend  We visited with her and returned two weeks later to check on her. She is a feisty elderly woman who lives on top of a mountain with a great view. She has to park at the bottom of her mountain when there is too much snow, which there was. She  lives in a small one room house, has a gravity well, heats solely by her wood stove, and her only source of electricity is from her solar panels (for her lights, fridge, and stove). 

Me on a walk and our home

 Walk with me up our driveway!

 Other adventures:

We made feta and stored it in olive oil with a clove of garlic and sundried tomatoes.

 Simon made popovers stuffed with some leftover innards from his mincemeat pies.

I made chicken, spinach, mushroom turnovers.

 And the snow is finally melting and the ground is beginning to green up!

 Last night our power was out when we got home (this also means no water--the well pump runs on electricity). It had been windy and a tree had fallen across a line somewhere. We hooked up our cute little generator that Simon's parents sent us a month ago, 'just in case.' We'd also acquired and extension cord two days before on the off chance we needed to use the generator or plug in anything outside away from the house. We plugged in the generator to a lamp and finished folding laundry and settling in for the evening. I put a frozen icepack into the fridge and figured we'd be set, at least overnight. The power was still not on when we woke up this morning, so we got the generator running and plugged in the fridge to it for about an hour before the power came back on. While it has enough power for lights and fridge, it is too small for our microwave or toaster...but it would have been strong enough for our smallest waffle iron!