Your son and brother graduated with his masters yesterday. He's awesome.

Snow day!!

I can't believe it!! We were awakened this morning at 5:48am with phone call from the school district. NO SCHOOL!!!! This is miraculous! We send our kids to school in blizzards, in -40 degree wind chills, there is no closing of the Bismarck Public Schools! Then, lest we think it was a dream, we got another call at 6:20am with the same recorded message. Of course the kids all got up at their normal time, with out being woken up for scripture time. Why is it that on school days we have to drag them out of bed but on non school days they wake up early on their own???

Anyway, just had to mark this miraculous day for you all to know about. We got 6-8 inches since yesterday of wet heavy snow, all the trees are hanging low, covered in snow. We are are still under winter advisory until 7pm tonight. I suppose that means the pinewood derby and New Beginnings will be canceled, along with the school program last night. Oh how I love living in this crazy cold nasty place... at least I keep telling myself that.

For those of you enjoying 70 degree, please enjoy it for us, too!

Home efficiencies

I've been reading a book called "The All New Square Foot Garden". The guy's plan seems pretty good. He was a civil engineer and an efficiency expert before he retired and took up gardening. He was surprised by how inefficient the typical methods were, that he decided to change them all. His method reduces or completely eliminates the need to plow/turn/till the soil, fertilizer, weed, and significantly reduces the amount of water you need to use. He's essentially removed the all the unnecessary steps in gardening. I'm excited to try his method when we get out to Colorado.

The book got me thinking about home efficiencies. The thing that I've been thinking about most is laundry. I don't like to do the laundry. Well, what I really don't like is to fold. I think folding is just a silly thing to do. I think that just more of my clothes will make things a lot more efficient. So, I ma going to start hanging all of my clothes except my socks and underwear. If it works well, I'll hang the boys clothes when we get to Colorado. I'll report on how it all goes.

Also, when we get to Colorado, I'll see if I can't chronicle my square foot garden so you all can see how it works.

Non-food storage list

I've been considering what non-food items I want to include in my storage. Here's my list. Any thoughts?

Kitchen Stuff

Salt

Dog Food

dish soap

aluminum foil

plastic wrap

ziplocks

garbage bags

paper plates

plastic utensils

Other

matches

laundry detergent

fabric softener

stain remover

fuel

contacts

contact solution

diapers

wipes

Bathroom Stuff

tooth paste

soap

shampoo

conditioner

toilet paper

birth control

pads/tampons

tooth brushes

deodorant

razors

lotion

hand soap

floss

First Aid

bandages

tape

gauze

antiseptic

tylenol/ibuprofen

anti-histamine

alkaseltzer/antacid

cold medicine

cough drops

cotton swabs

sun block

aloe

hand sanitizer

I plan on having all this stuff in our storage along with all the canned and dried foods that we normally eat. I intend to guess how much of that stuff we use in a year, buy some portion of that, and then keep track of how much we actually use for a number of months to refine my year's estimate. We'll keep with a print-out of the list on a clip-board with all the items in a column on the left and then columns for each month on the rest of the page. We'll put hash marks in the current month every time we take an item so I can estimate at first from one month's use, then two, and so on. It should give me a pretty good estimate.

I also plan on setting up my shelves so that you can access the front and the back to make FIFO easier. I've considered getting some of these shelves. They're pretty expensive, but look like they'd work really well--and I wouldn't need access to the back. We'll see how my initial plan works.

Finally, we're going to do better at storing water when we move. We've done pretty well at filling our empty juice containers with water, but we never rotate them. The plan is to have a number of shelves devoted to water. We'll rotate the water by always having a "fill" shelf and a pull shelf. The idea is that you pull from one shelf, drink that water, fill the container and replace it in the fill shelf. Once the pull shelf is empty, it becomes the fill shelf, and the next oldest shelf becomes the pull shelf. I think we'll be able to make this work. We'll see.