Undercover

Michigan tricked me again. I know our weather is extremely fickle so I try not to quickly believe warm weather has arrived to stay. We had snow flurries in early May, but that’s not surprising to me. Two weeks ago, we had freeze warnings. Ok. Fine. I know we typically can have freezes until mid-May. We have a 10% chance of frost until June 13 or so but when temperatures reached the low 80s (F) last week, we thought we were safe so we planted our gardens AND I took most of the blankets off our bed because it was too hot at night with them on.

Ha! Michigan is as bad as Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic. We’ve had freeze warnings the last two nights and we are expecting another freeze tonight as temperatures dip into the low 30s. EJ and I have been putting our tender garden plants undercover each evening, and we’ve put the extra blankets back on the bed to cover up ourselves at night. I’ve gone back to wearing my chore coat when I go outside because “Brrr!” We’ve turned the space heater on to take the chill off in the house–but we’ve NOT turned the furnace back on as a statement of resistance. Michigan is tricky but will not totally break us.

When we moved into our house–almost SIX YEARS now!–we turned our extra bedroom into our library. All the walls are lined with shelves filled with books, except for where our desk is. We even have books on shelves that hang over the entrance and closet doors. Despite all our shelves, we still have books double shelved. We like books. Yesterday EJ and I sorted through the books and discarded a few that we have extra copies of or which we no longer want. By “discarded” I mean that we put them in boxes to donate. EJ has gone to buy a few more bean seeds and he will drop the books off at Goodwill as well.

Turkeys are usually very inexpensive at Thanksgiving in November so we always buy two or three. One we cook for Thanksgiving and the others we freeze for later in the year. EJ is cooking the last of our turkeys today. We will eat some of it today and I will turn the rest of it into turkey potpies on Sunday. I always make up several and freeze them, and then we bake one on days when we are busy and/or don’t feel like cooking. Potpies are one of my favorite meals.

Baking in the oven helps warm up the house when Michigan is cold. We can be tricky too.