Cold Week

It has been so cold outside. The last few days the high temperature has been -8F. Tomorrow, I hear, it's supposed to warm up to 20F Above! Yeah, us Northerners, when a cold spell breaks and temperatures rise above zero, we call it "Above". Yesterday my preschooler's school was canceled because of the cold. I felt so bad for her because she really wanted to go. We had a difficult morning because of it. Last night, when the wind chill was -25F (aka cold beyond comprehension), places were already announcing closures for today.

As I was falling asleep last night, I kept thinking about the homeless in Milwaukee. We live close to Milwaukee and regularly give to the shelters and food pantries in the city. I kept thinking about how on the news today and for the next few days, reports are going to be trickling in about how many of the homeless have died due to exposure overnight. And then there are the reports about how the shelters are filled to capacity and had to turn people away. How the fire stations and other public buildings had to open their basements to house the homeless for the night on makeshift cots in giant rooms all lined up. It makes me feel sick. As a mother, homelessness is an issue very close to me. I've never been homeless, and I've never known someone who was homeless in a traditional sense. Still, though, my heart aches. For as judgmental a person I can be, I can't help but feel compassion for people who just need a little help. To me, it doesn't matter what caused a person to become homeless in the first place. What matters is to help them in their current situation.

You've heard the cliche before: "it's not a hand-out, but a hand-up". To me, we were all created equal. Every single person in the world is capable of the same feelings. Everyone breathes the same air. We're all the same in God's eyes, whether we have a million dollars or absolutely nothing.

So take a moment and consider how truly blessed you are. You are warm and comfortable, well-fed, and you even have time to read this little blog. You are fortunate.

Fridge Disaster

This morning as my husband was about to leave for work, I went to get a glass of water from our water dispenser on the door of our freezer. It didn't work. After opening up the freezer section and the refrigerator section, we discovered the temperature inside was the same as the temperature outside. Agh...

So instead of working on my blog right away like I used to, I set to work emptying the freezer. I know the usual advice is to leave everything in there and don't open the door till the coldness comes back, but everything was starting to melt. The ice was dripping on the bread...it was chaos. Well, thank goodness it's January. I like to stock up on produce from the garden and the farmer's market, but by January that supply is less than half of what I started with this year. When I run out of stuff, or get severely low, I like to stock up when I can get a good price. I was in the process of starting to stock up because, oddly enough, I just about ran out of everything all at once recently. Another good reason to be happy it's January is that the high outside today is -8F. You read that right- negative eight degrees Ferenhieght is the high for today. So I was able to put half of the stuff in the freezer in the chest freezer in the basement, and the other half I put on the porch.

I decided to wait a bit to empty the fridge since it seemed a little cooler in there. I put everything that had to be refrigerated and could not be frozen into our camping cooler. It's a big cooler, but it doesn't have enough room for everything from the fridge. I used the rapidly melting ice from the freezer in the cooler. I figured I was saving myself the trouble of cleaning up the mess later and cooling the refrigerator food at once.

Pressing on, I did a little research online to figure out the problem. Seems like a simple enough fix, so I'll have my husband work on it Saturday. The part we need costs $60, whereas having a repair person come over would cost $300, so we're saving ourselves $240.