the beginning of the melt - ice storm tennessee january 2026

 

 

 

 It is February 3rd, and the ice has begun to fall off the roofs, but the road is still covered in it.  Yesterday, at the peak of the temperature, an hour before dusk, some bits of the road were slushy.  Other areas, mostly in shadow, were still as slick as the bottom of an enameled bathtub.  Today, at 9:30 am, no bit of the roads are slushy, yet.   And today is overcast, where yesterday had sun.  It is forecasted to rain a bit this afternoon, as well - we will see what happens.  I loaded the propane tanks into the car, and a box of salt and a couple of bottles of water.

I walked out to the 600 hill again, which is halfway to the highway from us, about two miles there and back.  I saw a blood trail where something, perhaps a deer, had crossed the road.  My hound went nose-down into the woods and followed it a bit, and came back to tell me it how it smelled.  I worried about her last night, when she went out at 1 am and didn't return until after 4.  I told her she almost had me planning missing posters with all the melting and falling ice and slick gullies etc, and the coyotes howling and foxes arguing that ring out over the hills.  The geese and turkeys have been loud - and I heard a woodpecker when I was out there this morning.  I saw a murmuration of starlings at the highest point of the hill.  I did not see enough melting to go get in my car and try the hill.  I barely saw any road at all anywhere, only where the one neighbor has had his monster truck in and out to check on his relative and then struggled getting it back up the hill to his house.

 I feel trapped and that perhaps I should be brave and just go for it - but I've also been down in the ditch in a much worse situation than I had been earlier in the morning, for trying such a thing.  And that time it was very difficult to get anyone to  come out and help even the next day - they heard where, and said 'no, not in this weather.'

Mark says 'don't go down the mountain until you know you can get back up it.'  Yes.  The only good thing about that is if these roads become clear, we can be certain almost everywhere else is.  Yes.  He has been cold all night (66 degrees) which is less than he can usually afford with his breathing condition.  We had a wellhouse heater and a heat lamp in there to bring it up to 69 yesterday, but for safety's sake had turned it off and turned the house heat up for the night.  With the propane, we keep it at 72 for him usually.

So, *blow air up forehead*  I'll get my walking in and go back out there again after another few hours.  Sat down and drew a hungry heron looking at a fish in the water before I set out this time. (below) with a bit of gold wishing in the corner for the sun to shine a bit more on this ice and melt it.

 

february 2

went out three times today,

it was still glare ice at 11 am

at 1:45 - it was starting to break a little and the roofs were beginning to drip again

the ice above is from 3:30 pm today, but a small bit of the county road was slushy, will refreeze overnight, but we'll hopefully get somewhere tomorrow as it is set to be as warm as it ever got today a little earlier tomorrow, but then it is supposed to start raining in the afternoon

the propane ran out for Mark's heater last night - I turned up the electric heat and then rigged him up a wellhouse heater and he put a heat lamp out for our little elderly cat who wanted to be warm in his room but didn't like the air blowing out of the heater 

mountain top

side of the road in front of the next gully

It was still zamboni smooth ice at 10:45 - you can see the shine on it

Minerva walking up our driveway

Winter Wise

pens and gold paint 

 

simple onigiri with adzuki bean paste

 

Well, we've been iced in all week, and I have this cupboard of dry foods that I eat, but no one else in the house does, or rarely.  These are habits I learned in Fargo, where we had organic health food and Asian market stores.  The onigiri, though, I only learned the full form of in the past few years.

First : the adzuki beans.  One of my local stores had them last year and I was happy!  I bought a bag and have been using it up.  They require at least 12 hours of soaking, and then cooking for a long time, and then pulverizing and cooking some more, and a little bit of brown sugar (and mirin, which I finally found this year, too - the local stores are carrying more oddity things).  They sell the finished thing in the store as 'red bean paste' or 'adzuki bean paste' but that is even sweeter and would be expensive to buy pre-made.

So I spent the morning experimenting, once again, with the bean paste that I rarely make.  I also ended up putting some baking soda in it at one point and being afraid I had done something terribly wrong ala chemistry.  But, no, that worked well.  It just foamed up and looked odd for a few minutes probably with the bit of rice wine vinegar I had in the water during the boiling.  Anyway, it became success.

Once that was turned off, I started the rice - which I'm pretty good at by now.

1 cup of rice, washed - 2 cups of water, bit of olive oil, bit of salt, bit of rice wine vinegar, boil until it is almost dry, but not quite.

Mix in 1/4 cup or LESS of white sugar, and just enough rice wine vinegar on top of that until the sugar is wet, no more - mix while still hot, over and over, scraping the spoon over and over, until the mixture is soft - then add white sesame seeds, and mix one more time. 

 

At the beginning of learning this rice mixture, I just made rice balls out of the rice mixture itself, and added a little bit of seaweed on top of each one - it was still very good, and easy to bring in a lunchbox. 

Here is the pinch point.  The rice will be hot and doing it by hand is possible but your hands will turn red.  When I did that I put some salt on my hand, made the ball, and then put the ball down in the glass plate, salt in hand, repeat etc.  I bought some little onigiri triangular molds last year and have used them a few times.  The trick is to not put too much rice in the first layer - and then add a tiny bit of salt (shio), then a spoon of the bean paste, then another layer of rice, and press the mold together until it is firm.  Press the mold out on the plate and it should look like the onigiri in the picture below, white rice on both sides, with a bit of bean showing in the cross section.  Take a small piece of seaweed and wrap it around the bottom of the triangle so it can be held easily.  Stand the onigiri up and move onto the next.

This can get very messy.  I probably need more practice.  I end up washing and wiping my hands clean every minute or so until I am done - and end up with a stack of nice snacks.

I put some red curry paste, real mayonnaise and wasabi paste on a plate and eat one with a fork - probably not allowed, but I really like the condiments. 

Time-intensive, the materials were harder to find, but NOT expensive.  

Even the onigiri molds were only three dollars - it was just getting them when we were getting something else and then actually using them that is the kicker.

   

dry goods cabinet - with split peas, lentils, rice, noodles, and dried beans.  There are a few cans of sardines and some more curry paste and blocks behind there, as well. 

peanut butter cookies (again)

 1 egg, no milk

 

preheat oven 350 degrees, parchment paper on baking sheet

cream 1/4 c. (half a stick) butter and 3/4 cup creamy peanut butter with 1/2 cup packed brown sugar and 1/4 cup white granulated sugar

mix in 1 large egg and 1 tsp vanilla

combine in separate bowl 1 cup flour, 1/2 tsp baking soda, 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt, mix thoroughly to avoid clumps of soda or baking powder

mix dry into wet ingredients just until dry is fully combined

 make small balls not much larger than fifty cent pieces and press down on top with a fork to flatten

 

bake for 13 to 15 minutes, pull out and put onto a cold surface to harden and avoid overburning the bottoms by leaving them on the pan

will be crumbly, but undercooking is also better than overcooking, as they continue to 'cook' for a few minutes after they are out of the oven and overcooked ones get very hard when they cool

 

assemblage of thoughts

1.) keeping all those odds and end vegetables in the freezer and bags of split peas and lentils in the cupboard pay off making big pots of soup to eat during this freeze in.. even if Esme and Mark don't eat it, I eat it and they can eat the other things.  I just don't actually get to making the pots of soup often enough and when they make dinner I usually eat it with them.

2.) we did the stock up runs last week 'just in case' and just in case did happen - we bought extra goat feed, cracked corn and chicken feed, and we've opened them all.  I should have stocked one extra bag of dry cat food, too.  We have enough because I stocked up an extra stack of their wet food they get every night - but it would run out before the other feeds

Our prep was running after work to what place was open - feed store one day, propane the next day (we stood in line for an hour, luckily did get some), stocked up on a few groceries that day which we are using now - Esme found the very last gallon of whole milk at that time the store had - and we are using it - and the store was out of almost all kinds of bread and many vegetables already - next day hunt for bread and a few other things, got one loaf, next day : hunt for bread for Grandma and a case of water, dropped her off one loaf from the same place we got one the day before, which we used just a little bit when the power was out and the well was off.  

used : both containers of ready-to-mix pudding I bought, Esme's ramen, frozen biscuits, bacon, split peas, all the cookies, baking powder

could have used but then found some in our storage : quart jar rings!  and we need to find the propane adapter for the bottle - we didn't need to use the camp stove this time around but we came close , I filled all four clean quart jars we had with water and put rings on them and put them in the room with the propane heater in case we really did get to a bad level with our water.  we wished we had filled up the two five gallon buckets and set them in the bathtub (our bathtub does not hold water long-term) although we had filled about six gallon containers and used three of them before the 9 hour power outage ended.  We were SO lucky to not have pipes burst.

glad to have had in storage : brown lentils, whole wheat flour, regular flour 

3.) Mark and Esme aren't eating the soda bread, either - but I am.  I've had it every day since I made it in some way or other.  I had put half of it, sliced, in the freezer, and put that in hot soup today.

4.) when I'm studying lots of languages together, my facebook has NO idea nor my pinterest - they're picking it up somewhere as a cookie or something, and then my ads and recommendations are in all sorts of wild languages.  Interesting, but also eyebrow raising.

5.)  you'd think I'd start editing one of my books, yea, you'd think that

6.) did start a weaving, made a washcloth, finished a rug, and cleaned part of the upstairs

7.) did the budget for the next few months being pessimistic because I have missed a week of work and I know we will need to be even more careful

8.) reminded myself that risking vehicle, life or limb is the worse of those situations, multiple times, and of course I still beat myself up about it every few hours

9.) audited my knit items that I've made that I was told by many 'you'll never use that' etc... yea, ta-da, using all of it, thank you.  It's not time wasted.  The shawl that took months to finish, wrapped around me right now.  The other little shawls that were 'why do you need that?' one of them is in my bed as an extra shoulder cover at night.  The gloves that took weeks, each pair, EXTREMELY useful, and when one is wet the other one is ready.  The rugs and small wraps and slipper socks and hats and scarves.  I've got them, and I know how to use them.  The queen sized knit striped blankets I spent more than a year making - four of them - one for each of us and one for grandma - we each have one on our beds right now and are using them.

10.) staring at my garden seed trays that I never planted much out of last year, but did use the things I did plant

11.) Mark has grown an absolutely enormous and lovely aloe vera crown from the bits he took off my plant upstairs that is still struggling to live

12.)  Turkish, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Lithuanian/Latvian, French, and that guy in the podcast assures us that if we don't focus on just one language for an extended period of time we'll never learn it.  Spock Eyebrow.

13.) If we had breeding goats they'd be dropping tons of babies right now - seeing it all over the feed, quadruplets, quints, sextuplets, etc. etc.. one goat is a lot, and fifteen chickens - and I don't spend quite enough time with them as it is. 

14.) We are thinking about getting a few more chicks this year because of the aging out of the flock we have - and winter hardiness was always a big point for us - the Sapphire Gems have done fairly well, still have four out of the six but the two that we lost a few years ago were one right after the other.  The Cinnamon Queens have been the best.  I feel sorry for my little Americaunas sometimes so much smaller than the others, except the yellow one, Speck, which might have been a cross over from another box, because she grew up an entirely different color and size than the others.

 15.) lots of notes, what we need to stock up on again, budget, reminders for later etc.

 16.) ribboning the extra whole fresh carrots and putting them in the freezer from the meal a few weeks ago worked great - the last of that went in the soup today.

17.) when the soup is nearly overboiling on the stove, the celery seed smells strongly *ha* 

split peas

frozen bits of bacon, onion, summer squash, carrots, ginger,  

 bit of olive oil

celery seed

 black pepper

small bit of 5 spice powder

water

boil long until the split peas are well mushed

blend it all up, put up a quart jar to cool and then in the fridge

eat the rest

*eating the rest* 

 

  

Sing the Golden Path

Sing the golden path

what else can you do? 

in this space between winter and spring

it is not foolish to dream

of the flowers in winter

only to expect them

to suddenly appear

 

 

 

scouting trip - ice safari

 Because I'd much rather be out there on foot and see how bad it is, than to get into my car and end up down a ditch at the first turn etc.  We were wondering if 39 degrees might be enough that we could get out and get over the roads and get a new tank of propane - but seeing this, I don't think so.  Plus, as Mark put it 'even the dog with adaptive four wheel drive took a slide of course people and cars will, too'.  I saw evidence of even deer couldn't keep their footing and slid noticeably in their footprints - and a video online of a deer trying to get down a hill that just ended up doing a belly slide all the way down.

 In order, from the beginning to the hill where I fell on my own tail and decided to come home.  I didn't split open my knee again, which is good.   

 

 

 

 

and that was the big hill I've been stuck on several times before.  A few years back I got stuck on the OTHER side of that double hill and had to stash the truck in a neighbor's yard for two weeks until someone helped us pull it out.  It was either there or I was going down one of those gullies with it, and I gave up and walked the rest of the way home.

Knitted these gloves on my 'pseudocode' pattern a long time ago now, and still using them.  I have a green pair that doesn't have the enormous cuffs - but on occasions like this I can see why I originally made them like this.

the ice can be pretty, too - but there is still a whole heck of a lot of it out there

did try to take some pictures of the turkey and deer tracks out there - but on the phone camera it is mostly white on white, hard to see them. 

Hard won small progress from yesterday - lots of ice bricks thrown to the side, but still only about a 4 foot by 4 foot area cleared.  It is sleet on top of actual ice on top of hardened sleet again and then powdery fluff beneath it.  Mark says 'this is why this almost unplowable out there - and why driving over it when it is melting is so slick and compacts it worse.'   This is how hard I tried to get down to the gravel yesterday when it was barely 32 degrees out - I might go try again after a little bit here but I will not be trying to get out and get to town and back.