Disaster Cat is an ex-patriot Californian, living in rural Ireland with husband, dogs, horses, chickens and many, many cats..
The House Heat is Working!
Published on October 14, 2004 By Disaster Cat In Home & Family
Greetings everyone in Disaster Cat Land,
I'm taking time from packing for our weekend SCA event (re-enactment) to let everyone know that things are improving here. From feedback I've gotten from concerned friends and family, I felt I had to let folks know that not every day here at Kilmurry is Crazy. Just most of the ones I decide to write about. The ones in between are often calm, even sometimes a bit boring. Though the latter doesn't happen all that often.

Anyway, I am happy to report that by Tuesday of this week, we had a working house heater, a working stove top and lots of hot water! The actual hot water heater is still broken, but its cold enough outside to run the house heat on a timer. And that keeps the house water hot without having to light up the turf stove. I like my turf stove, I really do. And as a good survivalist housewife, I'm very happy that its here. But, until the next bomb falls, ice age arrives or modern civilization falls, I really prefer not to have to light it first thing in the morning. At least not until I've had a chance for a cup of tea to open up my eyes. And waiting an hour for the water to heat to make tea..is..well..it just isn't very civilized.

So, Tuesday morning I got to sleep in. Same with Wednesday...last night I stayed up and watched the "debates" even though we've voted already. That's the fun part of living over seas, you can cast your vote before everyone else and then pay as much or as little attention to the election as you like. In my husband's case, that's no attention, in mine...well Disaster Cat has to keep an eye on things...

Well, guess its time to end this quite time period and get packing for the weekend. I have no idea which pile the feast gear is under (everyone brings their own eating utensils, plates and cups). I'm afraid I get an "F" in terms of Fly Lady de-cluttering this week. Still, I got lots of trim woven to try and sell this weekend and finally managed to inventory my sales stuff. So, I guess I'm getting something done after all. Oops! Just remembered I need to go drain some more apple juice out of the Finnish Steamer...what me do almost anything to get out of packing a car...? You bet!

Meanwhile, I'll try and look for interesting things to report on when we get back from England on Monday...

Disaster Cat

Comments
on Oct 14, 2004
SO you are telling me that you have no electricity in your old castle, so you can't heat up water in an electric kettle?

OOOH THE HORROR! Run for your lives. No tea or coffee till the peat gets burning. I would just die without my coffee immediately after waking.
on Oct 18, 2004
Well, we don't really live in a castle (we did rent one for a year though...the roof leaked so bad we had water buckets in the drawing room). Now we live in a 200 year old rectory. The "mini" "big" houses the Church of Ireland built for their 18th century parsons. The ones who were supposed to have the English land-lords in their congregations.

Tomorrow will also be another "planned outage" (I suspect these have something to do with all the new ticky-tacky houses built recently in our village). But this time we got word one day ahead, so I just made a Thermos full of hot tea for tomorrow morning. And, I've stacked the turf stove to the brim, in hopes that at least the kitchen will be warm....And I went ahead and took a long, hot bath tonight. We sill need to get lamp oil (its supposed to be dark and cloudy again tomorrow). But I plan on just sitting by a fire in the drawing room tomorrow and reading a good book (with wool blanket if needed). Lets see if this works out or if the best laid plans will....well you know?

Anyway, love your posts and comments,
Disaster Cat (hopefully between disasters at the moment)