16.0201-0900 As predicted, I seldom worked past noon
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@25.0517-1030.27atx
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Dear Marla,
I cannot believe I have already been here a whole month!
As James had predicted when he hired me, now I seldom work much past mid-morning except for a brief flurry of activity to get dinner ready in the late afternoons.
It's all very informal. Over the past month, Lorraine has gently guided me into housekeeping at the Hahnestery. Mostly, she tells me where my various housekeeping tools and materials are stored. When I ask her what tasks she wants me to do, she often replies with her standard response of "If this was your home, Thalia, what would you do?"
Basically, when it cm
One of the unexpected challenges I face now is planning meals when we only go into town to shop once each two weeks. We call this the 'Big Shop'. I've learned to write the date on perishable items on the day we buy them so that I can keep an eye on how long they stay usable as food. It also means I need to learn to cook meals for the Hahns that are more likely to involve longer-lasting food ingredients. For example, fresh produce items like tomatoes and lettuce need to be eaten soonest after a
Shopping is kind of a big deal when one lives far away from 'civilization'. On every other Thursday, we go all the way into Thorpton to visit the big box stores. On a good day, downtown Thorpton, population about one million, is a bit more than an hour drive away from the Hahnestery. However, we rarely ever needed to go all the way in. We'd just go to the super-malls located toward the periphery suburbs on the west side of the city. That would cut 15-20 minutes off of our trip.
The Hahns and I would pour over all the sale flyers that came in the mail from various grocery and home improvement stores, decide what we wanted to buy and then planned our route accordingly.
James and Lorraine, being the creative people they are, had an old, small, horse trailer specifically set up for this. It contained an old, yet quite large refrigerator. Next to it was a medium-size chest freezer. James had rigged both to run on batteries. There was also room enough for several large, stackable totes which held non-perishable items such as flour, pasta, etc... After visiting, say, a grocery store, we'd load all our purchases into them while stil in the parking lot.
The ice cream didn't to melt at all and the milk stayed fresh on the long ride to home. It also meant we didn't have to rush going from one store to another. We could buy ice cream and then go to another store to leisurely shop for, say, some electrical gizmo for one one Jame's projects. It meant that shopping could be 'fun'.
The best part is that when we got home, he would back the trailer up against the porch by the kitchen and then disconnect the truck. This is where the trailer 'lived'. The Hahns had elevated the earth under it slightly so that the trailer bed was on the same plane as the porch. The result was like having a pantry on wheels. We could drag the totes from the trailer a half-dozen yards across the porch and into the kitchen to unload them.
Even though the walls of the trailer were made of aluminum, the stuff in the totes had to go into the house before nightfall. If the bears smelled food in it they might destroy the trailer to get at it. There was less need to unload the refrigerator and freezer because the bears could not smell their contents. In fact, there were times when we left the trailer plugged into the house power so that I could just leave certain perishable items out there until I needed them for some meal.
James told me the other day that he would be going into Thorpton more often once the 'yard sale season' began, usually on a Saturday. I'm invited to tag along with him. He says he looks for 'weird stuff' that he can use in one of his many projects. He pointed to a heavy glass bell jar in the library about the size of my head and said. "I got that for three dollars! That's laboratory grade stuff - it probably cost someone several hundred dollars. Of course, I just had to buy it." Then he winked and grunted. "I just know I'll find a good use for it, someday."
There are times when I work pretty hard at something, but that usually doesn't last very long. For example, Lorraine says I should shoot for vacuuming the house once a week or so. (She says that's just a 'guideline', not a 'rule'. She's generally laid-back like that.). But she also says I can pretty much ignore the unused rooms upstairs. Furthermore, most of the floors downstairs are bare hard wood with throw rugs on them. Even with the additional time required to dust mop the bare floors, the entire job took only an hour or two once a week!
Both James and Lorraine wore nothing by jeans and t-shirt during the day. At about 5pm, one of them would ring a little bell signifying the end of the work day. They would change into something a bit more formal when it was time for cocktails. They said these rituals helped them with transitioning from "work" to (giggle) 'not-work'. There was supposed to be no shop talk after that. We talked about the weather, shopping, the critters that were our neighbors, the forest, the house, etc.
Of course, the hours of 'work' were a little different for me.