No Heat! Oh My!

Here's the scene:


Our furnace has been on the fritz!  This morning it was a chilly 59F/15C degrees in the living room area and even colder in our bedroom! (Nowhere near as cold as it is outside, though.)

Everything is draped in ice. It's actually quite beautiful.

Except that EVERYTHING is covered in ice. Imagine backing out of our garage...

and driving up THIS driveway!  It took nearly an hour to chip through that stretch of driveway (and there's salt and sand on the driveway!

Once you get up our driveway, there's the hill on our road to get up!  Dad spent two hours shoveling the road as best he could so he could get to work.

 Meanwhile, the past three days our furnace hasn't been working!!  Luckily we've had a lot of help this season getting our fireplace in order.  A friend gave us a HUGE stack of uncut logs. Uncle T and Dad loaded the trailer and brought them back.  Then we were lucky to have the pure muscle and brawn of Uncle S to chop up the entire pile for us (with a dull axe we had on hand!).  ED has helping to keep the fireplace clean. And we've been spending lots of cozy, cuddly time in the warm homeschool room in front of the fire.

Oh and by the way, we finally were able to get repairmen just before noon -- and the furnace is back up and running! Whew!

On the homeschool front--I've been meaning to put up a post about our latest units. We've done lots of penguin-related activities and have moved on to the Middle Ages.  We've been having some really good school-time but life has been so busy I haven't made it on to the computer much.

On a good note, though, I'm feeling more organized than I have in ages (perhaps since last March when we began the moving process). 

• *I have a new weekly planner that includes a home-repair section since we've had so many house related issues (sewer, washing machine, heater, trying to better insulate the house since there are a lot of drafts, etc.) My weekly planner is where I write down all of the school related activities we do each day, but it's logical and easy to add in the home-repair things I've had to keep track of lately.  Last year I knew I wouldn't have access to a printer for a while when were moving so I had enough pages in my last homeschool planner to take me from July 2009 through Dec. 2010.
• *I've created a new file system for bills, medical files, the house, cars, dog etc. etc.  (we had SO many important papers that needed to be put away but hadn't filed anything since we moved in last July). 
• *I've created/posted a weekly dinner menu that hangs on the pantry door (nothing fancy just a sheet that has columns for M-F and space to write our dinner meals.  
• *And I've even made a lot of headway organizing our homeschool materials (though that's still an on-going project).  
• The house is reasonably clean (thanks to lots and lots of help from Grams and Gramps this December) and I feel fairly on top of it (until I go into the homeschool room and see why the girls have been so quiet and self-entertaining while I've been on the computer!!!)
• *And best of all with the in-person inspiration from my dear sister and brother in-law I've been carving out more me-time to run and stretch.  I only run for 30-45 minutes (I'm a former marathon runner) but I feel great to have some consistency with my exercise.  And, I found this awesome book that has me working on my flexibility.  I only do it in the evenings at this point, but am so excited to be making forward progress.  If you're interested it's called 7 Minutes of Magic: The Ultimate Energy Workout. I got it out from the library, but highly recommend it.  I've done many of these stretches over the course of my sports career.  Lately I found that I hadn't been stretching as I should and found I'm not as limber as I should be. This book and it's stretching routine is absolutely perfect for my needs. I've added it into my bedtime routine every other evening.