It was a dark and stormy night . . .
Seriously, it really was!

Thing’s I’ve learned in the last week about the country:

(1) On a dark and stormy night, the wind howls and makes me wish I hadn’t watched that Poltergeist channel.
(2) Snow drifts three feet high at the side of the house that cover the DirecTV dish will cause the TV to randomly shut off.
(3) The snow may not appear anywhere on the driveway, but will instead have drifted to cover the porch.
(4) Country roads do not get plowed in any hurry–hence the snow drift across the road in front of our house. Judging from the tire tracks, it appears that some enterprising neighbor actually went around the drift and across the neighboring field–there’s very little snow there!

And this week we’ve learned about heating oil. You see, in the city where we used to live, one just turned on one’s heater and voila, heat! Here in the country, one must call the heating oil guy who comes with his big truck and big hose which he attaches to a pipe on the outside of the house. He proceeds to send in however many gallons of oil we request and then we write him a check. When we first moved in (that day Tom arrived by himself and awaited the hallowed heating oil guy), we got about 150 gallons of the elixir of heat and our house stayed toasty warm until the end of December.

At that point, we arrived back here after Christmas to a very cold house (our poor fishy was rather dormant). Anyway, we got kerosene to allow us to sleep the night and then ordered more heating oil the next day. Same amount, 150 gallons, same price (high). We dropped our temperature and piled on the sweaters, vowing to make this tank last much longer than the two months it had previously lasted.

We awoke last week to a cold house and a dry tank. Which means we went through those 150 gallons in ONE month. That can’t be! We kept the temperature low! We piled on sweaters. Life is not fair! Life is COLD!

Well this time we determined to not buy any oil but to find another source of heat. This week we’ve used our electric space heaters as we studied Craigslist looking for wood stoves. Today we purchased one (well, we went out and purchased it after the plow came through to allow us access to our road). Tom is out buying flues and pipes and whatever else is needed to make it work. (I don’t try to understand these things.) We figure that wood will be much cheaper than oil.

Of course, we’re new to the country. What do we know?

And finally, one more thing I’ve learned this week,

(5) Hoosiers are CRAZY when the Colts go to the Superbowl!