Expecting the Unexpected

The RSS feed seems to be working again, but the validator is still flagging some posts as having problems. Unfortunately, Squarespace cannot seem to tell me what those problems are. Their support people continue to point me to knowledgebase articles with supposed solutions, none of which work. My posts are simple, consisting of text and a few photos. I write my posts within Squarespace’s blog editor. (They continue to warn me against cutting and pasting from Word or some other editor, which I’ve never done.) If they could tell me what I’m doing, I’d make a sincere effort not to do it again, but I suspect it’s something buried within the code that Squarespace generates and as I am not a coder, I don’t think it’s my responsibility to figure out what it is that is breaking the RSS feed. It’s like asking someone who doesn’t speak a foreign language to read the legal code in that language to determine what laws they are breaking.

We survived this latest onslaught of winter. The snowfall was minimal and it was windy, but not terribly so. The worst of the arctic cold doesn’t seem to have arrived yet—it’s zero degrees as I write this at 5:37 a.m., but we’ve had mornings recently when it’s been as cold as -18 degrees. One of our freezers decided to fail (of course), so we had a mad scramble yesterday morning of cleaning it out and moving things to other freezers just as the storm was blowing in. I cooked up what looked like it might have started to thaw out (half a dozen packages of ground pork) and put the cooked meat back into the freezer. I also had a box of beef bones in one of the freezers that was taking up a lot of space, so I roasted the bones in the oven and have them in the big roaster pan cooking down into stock (or “bone broth” if you’re feeling trendy). I’ll can that up in quart jars in the pressure canner this afternoon.

The husband worked on the freezer for a couple of hours. Hopefully the fix holds.

We’ve taken a lot of ribbing over the years about being “preppers,” but the reason for being prepared isn’t so we are ready for a zombie apocalypse—it’s so we are ready for those smaller, more frequent emergencies that happen to everyone eventually. They make take the form of a serious illness, job loss, natural disaster, freezer failure, or any number of other events. Having redundant backup systems allows us to weather them as speed bumps rather than situations that undo us completely.

I took this picture yesterday morning before the storm hit:

The husband parked the boom truck inside the new shop walls so it could help brace them against the wind.

I spent most of yesterday in the kitchen, so I didn’t get much sewing done. I have three more rows to sew on that Figures quilt top. It will still need a border, but at least I can get it off the design wall and put that sampler quilt up there. And I have prioritized my projects to the point where I can get some things finished, as long as I don’t start anything else. (I am trying not to laugh as I type that.) I do need to get back to that black and white travel bag; it stalled because I am making it up as I go and I need to spend some time figuring out the next couple of steps.

You might remember that I bought a skein of yarn at Hobby Lobby a couple of months ago for knitting up scrubbies. I made one that I left in the church kitchen; my friend Pat, who is in charge of the kitchen, just loves it. Unfortunately, that yarn stretches considerably when wet. A scrubby that started out as a 6” x 6” square expands to about 10” x 10” in water. I had a little bit of that skein left, so I finished it off and made two smaller scrubbies:

These will probably work better for getting into corners and other tight spaces. I’ll darn in the ends and take them to church tomorrow.