Time Traveling

The other day when the skies were blue and the ground was hard the hubby and I decided to drag a few bucket fulls of wood into the basement to store for our winter use.  As we were busy piling the wood at the very back of the first bunk I mentioned to hubby that the wood was kind of like time travel.  Of course he gave me one of those looks which he reserves for only me.  It says, "Hmmm, my wife just said something truly bizarre and I'm not sure if she is saying it just to yank my chain or if this is actually what she thinks and perhaps it has finally come to the point where I will have to start medicating her."  You may think that is a bit of a stretch for only one look, but we all know that a picture is worth a thousand words, so a look could potentially be a lot more.  I can imagine that someone you have known for a long, long time has many layers to just one look.  I'm betting that the top layer is easily decipherable and probably only showing a few dozen words like above, but then there must be all these underlying words which have been added to the look over all the years together which are not as obvious.  Like, "I'm married to a nut bar." or "I wonder if anyone else notices just how crazy she is?" or "I think she just said something I should just nod my head and smile." or "I should pull my boat higher up on the bank before the back end fills with water." 

Anyway so there we were piling wood and I was saying it was like time travel, which by the way the more I think about it, it is.  You see next spring sometime when we finally get through all the wood and to the back of the bunk we will be using up the wood that we just piled.  As sure as shit I can see us saying to each other, "Remember when we were stacking this wood last fall?  It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining, the air was warm but had just a touch of that fall coolness to the breeze, and we were stacking this wood saying that the next time we see it will be next spring."  Don't you think that is a bit like time travel?  It's like looking into the future, and then when we arrive it will be like looking back into the past. 

Speaking of the past, this coming Monday is Thanksgiving Day here in the land of beaver and moose, so I have done the proper buying of a turkey and getting prepared to cook me up some bird.  For some reason this year reminded me of my very first Thanksgiving supper which I cooked all by my onesies.  It involved a fire department and bleach.  You see we officially became "trailer trash" when we moved out west as young silly people who were all excited about becoming adults and being thousands of kilometers away from the parental units.  The trailer we purchased came with two of the appliances in their glorious golden hues.  Both the fridge and stove were completely functionable and quite adequate for people who knew how to make chicken noodle soup from the can AND from the box. 

I had even gone so far as to read the instructions on how to use said stove and fridge.  The stove turned out to be what they called a, continuous clean, unit which according to the instructions meant that it was supposed to clean itself as you used it.  It also stated in great big bold letters that under no circumstances should you use oven cleaner on it.  So of course what that meant to me was "Woo-hoo, I don't have to clean the oven."  Which I did not do for over a year.  That year saw old Iron Bess go from being able to cook virtually nothing to being able to whip up a supper of pork chops and mashed potatoes with the best of them.  So along comes Thanksgiving and a nice fat juicy turkey slated for dinner.  Well about half way through the roasting of the turkey the stove started to develop a small stream of black smoke coming from the vent.  Which as you can imagine alarmed me a bit.  A quick investigation showed that alas the continuous clean golden goddess of stoves was not all that clean, in fact it was down right grunge-o-rama, and said grunge was beginning to burn away in the long cooking time required for a turkey.  After a bit of pondering and head scratching I realized that I could not stop the cooking process at that point seeing as the turkey was still on the dangerous side of raw.  And the smoke was starting to get worse instead of better so the best option would be to keep the oven on and open the window next to the stove and allow the turkey to finish roasting while allowing the smoke to issue forth into the great outdoors where it would harm no one. 

I was quite proud of my vast abilities of deductions and Chef Boy R Dee-ness and happily went about preparing the rest of the meal.  I decided that after the turkey supper was over I would have a look at my high tech oven and see how one actually went about cleaning it.  Imagine my surprise when I looked out the front window only to see a crowd of people gathering around my house on wheels and a firetruck screaming into the trailer park.  Chagrined is the word that comes to mind. 

So I learned three things that day.  1) Never buy a continuous clean oven.  2) Smoke stains need bleach to get the stink out of them.  3) Take the paper bag of yucky turkey bits out of the bird before stuffing it.