Salon post: February 1

[jenett]

Good morning!

Topic of the week
It is currently ferociously cold across a lot of the United States. What do you like to do when the weather's awful outside? What makes a place feel cozy to you? Do you have particular food you make, or hobbies you make extra time for?

What I've been up to
Very busy week at work, mostly, and the last round of moving tasks. (Yay! Finally!)


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Comments

[redbird]

I was going to bake chocolate cake yesterday, but got distracted by more phone calls to my neurologist and the specialty pharmacy (the insurance company is delaying things). Maybe today, it's warm enough to go out but not warm enough to go for a long walk for the fun of it.

[cjsmith]

Baking sounds lovely. I hope you get a chance to make that cake soon!

[hobbitbabe]

Ruth Sawyer's 1940 novel The Year of Jubilo tells of a New York City family who copes after the father/breadwinner dies by wintering at a cabin in Maine. I think it's from that book that I got the idea of closing off rooms and huddling by the fire/woodstove/fireplace. A few times in my life I've had the chance to emulate that, although never in such dire situations, and it's always felt cozy and like an against-the-rules treat.

Nowadays, when it's cold out I close both bedrooms of my apartment with draft-stoppers, and put all the duvets on the futon in the living room, running the gas fireplace until I'm ready to go to sleep and then popping between the duvets to sleep. It might be more responsible for me to troubleshoot my flawed heating system and why the back bedroom is so cold in the first place, but this is fun.

In the daytime, if I can stay home I knit, cook things, and read books in the bath.

Checking in from work in Edmonton, it's minus 20 C here and windy. I've suggested to my co-worker that we could close the office and work at home if it keeps snowing, so we may do that (and I can get groceries on the way home). I can't really claim that I need to be home for safety, because I live closer to the office than anyone else.

[corvidology]

Sheep blankie, books and endless cups of tea.

[wohali]

What do I like to do when the weather's awful outside? My couch, blankets, knitting, tea, cat. Some sort of prattle on the television/laptop, typically a UK panel show of some sort (QI, Taskmaster, 8 out of 10 cats does countdown, etc.)

Do you have particular food you make? In the kitchen it tends to be beef stews: oxtail, goulash, paprikash, etc. Plus "cocoa" late at night, which for me these days is coconut milk beverage with cocoa powder stirred into it (no sugar). The cocoa habit goes back to when I was very young, my grandmother and I would make it together on the stove, in pre-microwave times.

[jazzyjj]

I've been staying indoors all week due to frigid temps here, although I did do my laundry on Monday downstairs. Just this morning I got a gmail account, to help out with a neighbor's startup. Account registration was pretty straightforward. No more inaccessible CAPTCHAS to deal with during the registration process for gmail, for which I am eternally grateful. Not that my tutors or someone else wouldn't have helped me, but ya know I just like to keep things accessible. As a matter of fact one of them did help me just in case we ran into difficulty, which we did but that's why I now have my own gmail account. Also been playing around with my Amazon device, and continuing to be super impressed.

[caprices]

I always seem to be working long shifts that bracket the worst of the weather, so I bring extra tea and hope fervently that we'll have a quiet night of it (it doesn't usually work out that way). The result is that I tend to sleep away the remainder of the bad weather. But if I have the great pleasure of a day to myself at home, I make more tea, bake cookies, and find a book to read.