Good Saturday afternoon! As I write this I am actually sipping grape juice instead of my regular morning tea, but I am going to go grab some tea in a moment. I have not tried any new tea flavors. I know. So boring. How about you? Any new tea flavors?

During our horrible cold snap last week, I was warming my rice pack and carrying it to bed with me each night, shoving it under the covers to warm the bottom of the bed up for my feet.

It reminded me of when I was a child, living in a drafty old 19^th century home with a radiator that liked to conk out at the wrong times.

My parents would fill a plastic bottle with hot water, wrap it in a towel, and put it at the bottom of the bed to warm the sheets before I crawled into bed. I was also covered with several blankets, one of them a woolen one that we eventually figured out I was allergic to because I would itch terribly under it. Some nights I would be so cold I would wake up hugging the water bottle and seeing my breath in the air.

Luckily that wasn’t common — only on absolutely freezing nights and when that old radiator in my room really acted up. If it was too cold, we all slept downstairs in our living room, sheets hanging over the doorways to keep the heat in one room.

When I was in my room, I’d also pile all of my stuffed animals around me until I could barely be seen under them.

It was almost as cold as that old house in our old early 20^th century home last week, but we are lucky to have both heat from our woodstove and heating oil downstairs. We have electric heat upstairs. Even with all three different types of heat we had a hard time chasing away the near zero temps.

A fellow blogger asked me last week why we have three sources of heat and my only answer is that this is how this house was built. For whatever reason.

The downstairs is heated by the furnace that runs on heating oil, but someone also installed a woodstove over the years. This allows for the thermostat to be turned down and save some of the heating oil throughout the winter. Heat from the woodstove can, and often does, travel up the stairwell and spread into the bedrooms, which means we don’t have to turn the electric heat up too much some nights.

The three sources of heat help us to spread out our costs over the winter months. Sometimes, though, like the week before last’s horrible arctic cold, the costs of all three increase.

We’ve had two firewood deliveries this year. Using a woodstove was something very new for me when we moved into the house five years ago. I’d never lit a woodstove in my life and figuring out how to burn the wood slowly and keep it going throughout the night was a challenge.

At first I wouldn’t even dare to attempt letting the fire burn all night. I was certain it would somehow catch the house on fire, which I now know is ridiculous with how the stove is set up. My dad was worried about the woodstove’s pipe, which he didn’t think was installed right. We found after he hired someone to fix it that he was right and we could have had a fire inside the wall if we hadn’t had it fixed.

I also made The Husband purchase carbon monoxide detectors to make sure we wouldn’t be gassed at night if there was ever a leak of some kind.

I didn’t even know how that all worked but I knew carbon monoxide detectors were important. We had them when we had natural gas at our old house too.

Even though we’ve learned a lot about how to conserve our wood during the coldest months of the  years, we still went through a lot this winter and still might need one more delivery to make it through the rest of the winter. We’ve been known to have snow storms in March here in Pennsylvania so we never exactly know when we will be lighting out last fire.

I find the last time we light the fire both exciting and sad. Exciting because I don’t have to clean the ash out in the mornings or work on lighting it or make sure it doesn’t die during the day and evening. Sad because I do love a cold winter night with a warm fire lit in the stove, a book open on my lap, a cat sprawled in front of the fire, another cat curled up on the ottoman and a sleeping dog on our broken recliner. Somehow the room seems much cozier and maybe even more alive with those flames flickering through the glass of the stove.

Switching gears a bit — Right after New Year’s I developed an issue with my knee and thought I might have to have an x-ray at one point. One night before bed I rubbed magnesium oil on it in addition to ibuprofen. My knee hurt the most when I lay on my side for some reason, so I figured it might be a muscle issue. I still had some pain overnight after using the magnesium oil spray, but in the morning, I used spray again and the rest of that day the knee felt much better. I was surprised by this development and decided to skip the ibuprofen or Tylenol I had been taking for weeks. The knee felt better for the next two days, and I was able to stop using a cane to get around the house.

I have had to use pain killers twice since then, but so far, so good. Apparently, the muscle around my knee simply needed to relax some and the magnesium helped facilitate that. I like to use natural remedies whenever I can but, in this case, I didn’t think a natural remedy would help. A CBD rub on stick was helping some as well, but the magnesium oil was the actual game changer.

Today I hope to go to my parents and help clean a little bit, visit with them, have some supper, and maybe play a game of intense Uno.

Tomorrow, we might visit them again.

The upcoming week is empty of any appointments or events, so far, other than Little Miss’s children’s club at a local church.

How was your week last week? Do anything exciting? How does this week look for you?

Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about what I’ve been reading and watching, etc. with my Sunday Bookends post.