When the temperature in Kotzebue drops below -20 for weeks at a time, a person has to simply find ways to make the outdoors beautiful.
Walking outside in this type of weather is a feast for your ears. Sound travels much quicker in the cold air and makes for a symphony of people's footsteps, breaths and howling dogs. You could almost do a weather rap with all that ambient noise!
"Ba ha hu ha...its COLD out... BA HA HA HU HA...don't freeze your snout!"
When our daylight gains 4 minutes of sun per day, but you still go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, a person simply has to take a long lunch break to marvel in the beauty of a cold day's sunrise/sunset.
The smoke stacks look like beautiful clouds sprinkled with a Kindergartener's pink painting skills. Electric lines look like sharp cuts in an otherwise perfect blue sky. The moon, which is still up, tries his hardest to peep through the bright light of the sun.
Pretty soon, rather than just brightness, the sun will actually provide some heat and we can take all the kids out fishing on the ice.
As for now though, its dang cold out there and will be for a while. So, marvel at the small things. Like waking up to a 60 degree house, realizing you ran out of stove oil and being happy that it wasn't a weekend where you had to pay a call-out fee! (Then paying $1,000 for 200 gal. of stove oil for the second time this month!)
8 comments:
this is such a true post! I never have seen a more beautiful sky than ones when it's -30 or -20.. sooo soo amazing!
geez isnt that a bit much for stove oil? do you use a wood stove?
Nope, that's the going rate. And I'm going to blame my husband on this one, but No, we don't have a wood stove. Oh...we don't have any wood around town. We have to drive about 30-40 miles to see trees...and then we have to have a permit to cut anything down on NANA lands. But still, I'm voting for a new woodstove rather than a new car next year! :)
$968.38 to be exact.
The last time we got stove oil was about a week and a half ago.
Last year at this time, we spent about $2,800.00 per month to heat our house until spring came.
Seems like we'd be smart and get a woodstove this summer...but rather than that, we spent about $5,000 or so re-insulating under the house and patching up holes that leak air into the house...
Maybe this summer though, its on my WISH LIST!
My Granny had an oil furnace. I will never forget the trucks coming and the insane cost. when she went into a nursing home and we had to sell the house, the new owners asked us what they were supposed to do with it. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it before. Oil is over $1000 here because nobody uses it, and there is always an extra delivery fee. How about a pellet stove? My Dad has a corn burning pellet stove. He says he pays almost nothing for the corn bags and that a garage-full gets him through winter in NM (Yes, no where near as cold as where you are, but worth a thought maybe?). I think it was about $3K and he installed it himself. The only thing you'd have to watch out for is of course, rodents trying to get the corn.
Insulating first was a smart first step, though!
Well, all of this is great, in theory, but people have to remember...we have NO trees here. We have no corn here. We have no pellets here. We have no coal here, etc. We have a lot of snow and tundra, so if someone could use that stuff, then all would be well in Lukin-land!
I'm still voting for the wood stove. I like getting wood, I like the drive, the work, the smell of the wood burning and the feel of a fire crackling on a cold winter day. So, we're just going to have to suck it up and get wood in the summer, with a boat, or get it in the winter and stack it outside our shop, like other people do. But, insulating was the first step according to my hubby. Then patching cracks and keeping the warm air we DO have, in. He's smarter than me when it comes to this sort of thing. :)
Yeah that is a good first step.
I know my friends at sisaulik always getting wood, and driving along time to get to it.. same direction they go to get frish water. I remember them buring drift wood too..but that means hours of beach combing, it is worth the work and drive to go get some real logs..easier on the chain saw too! :)
or
drive to your local chevron and buy a bundle.hahaha..
i would love to come to town this spring and follow go get wood..i bet our wood patch is really slimming down ...
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