Yesterday I shipped all my “by Christmas” orders. I’m open to new orders. “By Christmas” orders are first come first served and it’s only December 9th. I think it would make it. Then again we’re talking about the USPS here and there’s a blizzard going on; so I could be wrong. “After Christmas is OK” orders are also very welcome. If you’re interested please go to https://adaptivecurmudgeon.com/sawhorses/.
Yesterday was so chill. How was I to know today would go “full apeshit”? One crazy thing after another has hit in rapid succession. In lieu of a logical progression I’ll just relate random things.
First story is just a follow-up. The grouse that ran full tilt into my house was delicious! Mrs. Curmudgeon baked it with some sort of citrus. Yum! It made my day!
“House based roadkill” is the exact opposite of the whiny woke Karen-world that hassles us so much. There’s a redneck out there that eats birds that fly into his house! The whole planet would be a happier, mellower, less uptight, place if we all could say “a gamebird pancaked into the window… lunchtime!” No handwringing. No bullshit. Just a resource thrown at me as if God decided I needed a chicken dinner.
I nicknamed Mrs. Curmudgeon’s recipe “house grouse”.
Second, I installed the snow bucket just minutes before a snowstorm hit. Win!
My tractor’s front bucket is super handy but I need to swap to my “snow bucket” to plow snow. I put that off as long as possible.
Last year I waited too long! The snow bucket froze down. I’d already removed the regular bucket and done the painstaking hassle of hooking up the snow bucket only to find out I’d pinned my tractor to the earth. It was a struggle akin to pulling Excalibur from the stone. (You’d think my tractor would just yank a frozen bucket off the ground. It can’t.)
I learned from that. This year I rolled up to my snow bucket and gently nudged it with my still installed regular bucket. Was it froze down? Yep. Dammit!
Since I’d left the regular bucket on I had persuasion! Without leaving the cab I nudged here and pushed there and lifted a smidge and otherwise used every axis of rotation and torque factor on slippery snow. The ice gave way after a couple minutes. With the regular bucket I flipped the snow bucket, then flipped it back. Boom!
After that swaping implements was no big deal. Last year’s multi-hour struggle became this year’s 10 minutes of tricky driving.
Not ten minutes after I’d swapped the skies opened up and dumped snow like heaven was pissed at humanity. I’d just barely swapped buckets in time.
Next strange (odd?) event? I bugged out of our kitchen to my workshop.
Here’s the story: Our house is a shambles and ignoring a decrepit kitchen floor and ceiling had gone about as far as it could go. (No regrets! My house may be a dump but that’s why I can afford the mortgage.) We’ve got a contractor who knows our situation. We’ve been begging him to deal with it. After ignoring us for months he showed up hammer in hand. Nice! He disassembled the floor and ceiling like a total boss!
Then he vanished.
That was five days ago (I suppose the weekend doesn’t count.) I get it. He had an emergency frozen pipe situation to handle. Plus the weather has been a pain to everyone. But our kitchen is stuck in limbo somewhere between inconvenient and unusable.
What’s worse, the coffee pot was unavailable!
To stay alive, I’ve been cooking coffee with my camping percolator. Percolators make the best damn coffee but reaching for the kitchen stove over construction debris was a hassle. On the other hand, “no coffee” is simply unthinkable!
Eventually I got too stressed out over the kitchen. I bugged out for my workshop. Betsy the stove was ready to serve (just as she’s been for longer than I’ve been alive). Today’s breakfast and coffee was cooked on an antique kitchen woodstove in my “cluttered but cozy” workshop. Inconvenient? Yes. Delicious? Absolutely. Appreciated? Deeply!
I’ll probably make dinner there tonight too. (Update: I did.)
I have another story about a stuck truck… but it’ll wait.
“House Grouse” is a great term. We don’t have grouse, and the occasional small songbird isn’t on the menu. But I can dream.
Nothing like having a Plan B for coffee and food. Good luck with the kitchen renovation.
I would merely note that a bucket of hot water should be enough to unstick a tractor bucket…
That’s what I did last year but it was a pita hauling buckets out in the field where the tractor was.
Well then there is always the “flammenwerfer” which would surely do it faster, though your wife’s dog might get annoyed!!!
I considered just starting a campfire in the bucket, does that count? However, I tried a Mr. Heater and it didn’t do shit. Hauling buckets of hot water was a lot less fun.
House Grouse are delicious and so are Truck Deer; especially if it was someone elses truck!
I once ate Mercedes venison, still miss that car.
May we anticipate seeing a “House Grouse” recipe in the NYT cooking section soon?
Now I’m hungry.
No pallets under the snow bucket?
A man needs his coffee. The (presumably male) contractor should be denied coffee until your kitchen is useable. It’ll encourage him to be efficient.
One day I pretended the power was out and got out the percolator and camp stoves. What a PITA! Nothing fit like I thought it would and the garage wood stove isn’t suitable for cooking (I tried). It took an hour, but I made coffee; thinking of switching to tea…
There were no pallets under the snow bucket but there was a leftover pallet from my earlier experimentation that wound up underneath the regular (summer) bucket.
Percolators are slow. Betsy the woodstove is an old kitchen woodstove and works great with the percolator but it still takes 20 minutes before I’m pouring coffee. I think percolated coffee is the best tasting coffee I’ve ever made.