Sunday, January 6, 2008

Sausages


“Sausages,” my husband is saying softly to himself. “Sausages.”

Of course that is what he is saying, because it is January 4, and we are in the middle of the three-day Storm Of The Century, and the shrieking hurricane winds are bending our two-hundred-foot redwoods double, and the rain is slamming sideways against every window, especially those that are really old and leak ever so slightly in the gentlest spring showers, and now it is thundering AND hailing all at the same time which is truly special....oh and did I mention the power has been out for two days and we are stumbling around in the pitch dark?

Sausages. Just what we need.

Now to be fair to my husband, he really likes sausages. And when the rain started – in fact when it ramped up to its absolute worst two days ago – My Hero flung on his (new, for Christmas, to replace the twenty-seven old ones he already had that he uses to do things like muck out the pig stalls and repair gutters clogged with six tons of rotting leaves, you know, dirty, wet, messy chores) gold sweatshirt and red sweatpants and green rainjacket and hurled himself into the howling deluge with a shovel to see whether or not the culvert was working. You see, if it isn’t, water can’t sluice down the entire hillside of which we live at the bottom, funnel into our culvert, and explode back out again into the little creek that winds through our back yard, jumping its banks and flooding the lawn which is already flooded with....well, let’s just say the leach field underneath the lawn is not exactly new. And NO, I don’t want to discuss it.

Yep – what we need around here is a good sausage. Which said husband, who arguably deserves one, is now determined to cook six of for himself for dinner. “After all,” he explains, “They’ll go bad in the fridge if we don’t eat them.”

This is because we keep turning off the refrigerator to conserve what trickling power we do have, because the little black box on the wall in my office, the one that tells us how many amps or watts or volts each of our household devices uses when we turn it on (we’re not actually sure what the device is measuring, so we just call it “points”), tells us the refrigerator, especially when its little motor kicks in, which it does every few minutes for no discernible reason, uses lots and lots of points. And when we use lots and lots of points, the “percentage” of battery power we have left, which our little black box also measures and tells us about, goes down. Way down. Fast. Which is why we are creeping around in the dark, mostly, and using only the woodstove for heat, and have unplugged every conceivable appliance, even small ones, and are arguing with each other over whether or not a person could just eat a perfectly good bowl of cold cereal for dinner and be done with it.

Let me explain about the little black box. We don’t exactly have no power. What we have is an exciting new battery and generator system installed by Carl roughly a year ago for us to use if and when the power goes out – a system, due to the record-breaking mildness of last winter, which we’ve yet to use. A system that is dangerous and complicated and could kill us if we make a mistake, and which we are testing for the first time during The Storm Of The Century. Which may mean that even if we turn on the stove and the kitchen explodes the house won't actually burn down because it’s raining too hard to do anything but sizzle.

So – the generator, which has been sitting in a pool of water by my husband’s office door and which he has now dragged to a spot two feet from the front door under the leak in the eaves, braced with four bricks, and plugged into an enormous black extension cord, when turned on (so that a person could, for example, make sausages using the ancient electric stove, which would otherwise use an insane number of points, plunging the battery percentage into the negative numbers) sends power to the inverter which sends power to the eight batteries lying in the mud under the house which will make it possible to turn on a light and fry a sausage using lots of points BUT without losing percentage...maybe. Simple, right? Only we cannot find the manuals for the generator, inverter or batteries despite rooting around in my husband’s office in the dark for the past two hours.

So instead, we are stumbling around in the house with flashlights, one of us flipping appliances on and off while the other trains a light on the little black box and screams out number of points used as a result. “I’m turning on the fluorescent light in the kitchen!” my husband yells. “Six points!” I yell back. “Other light!” he yells. “Four points!” I yell back (which is odd, since it’s exactly the same kind of light, but whatever). “Microwave!” yells my husband. “Yikes! Fifty-two points!” I tell him. “Turn it off!!”

My turn, I say, switching on My Favorite Appliance. “Fiber optic Christmas tree in living room!” I yell. “Two points!” he yells back. “I told you it didn’t take any power!” I yell. “Living room light!”

“Four points!” he yells back. Hmmmm....so it’s cheaper, in electrical terms, to run the fiber optic Christmas tree, a beautiful and useful light source if ever I saw one, than it is the living room lights. I smell a deal in the works. One microwaved sausage – four thousand hours of Christmas. I love my little black box.

“Hall light!” I yell. “Twelve points!” he yells back. A terrible waste of power – except I’ve just found The Generator Manual, right here in the hallway, on the floor, in the corner. Good place for it.

Ah, The Generator Manual – an unassuming little booklet with a HUGE WARNING IN RED on every page that tells you how you’re going to electrocute yourself if you don’t do everything EXACTLY AS INSTRUCTED IN THE MANUAL. If I can please get my husband to read past page one...

“You just turn it on,” he says, heading outside as I am frantically scanning the section on how stale gasoline will absolutely, positively ruin the generator and may even cause IT to explode. CHANGE YOUR GASOLINE EVERY TWO MONTHS, screams Page Seven. “Uh....when did you last put gas in the generator?” I call out to my husband in a sweet, calm voice. “Last March!” he yells back over the roar of the generator, which he has just turned on, and which is belching gasoline fumes in through the front door. “Why?”

I know if I tell him he will yell back “Don’t be ridiculous!” which I do and he does. The generator is making strange grinding sounds as though it’s eating a pile of rocks. I wonder if that’s what they mean by “pinging and knocking” on Page 26, which if the generator is doing, you must IMMEDIATELY SHUT IT OFF!!

“I’ve put it on Eco-Throttle!” my husband yells proudly, fiddling with a knob on the front of the spewing, grinding machine. “What’s that?” I yell back. “I don’t know!” yells my husband.

A huge crash shakes the house. “WHAT WAS THAT????” I shriek, abandoning all pretense of calm and tearing outside in my pajamas. “I don’t know,” says my husband, who is visibly not dead, though quite wet – did I mention it’s raining? – and is looking around puzzled. “Wind, I guess.”

“.....Wind??”

“The house is constructed,” he explains, in the patient voice one might use with a small, not-very-bright child, “So that when wind comes, it flows up under the eaves and they lift a little and the house can shake. It’s called ‘loft.’”

“Oh,” I say. “Interesting.” Suddenly, the neighbor sticks his head over our fence. “You guys ok in there?” he yells. “What’s that awful noise?”

“The generator!” we yell back. “We’re fine, thanks. Why?”

“Just saw that tree come down on your roof is all,” he says. “Wondered if it came through the ceiling or anything.”

There is indeed a very very large branch of a very very tall cedar that has slammed down onto our roof across half the house and doubtless explains the large crashing sound I just heard, loft notwithstanding. And which might also explain why there is now a leak in the living room ceiling right over the woodstove so that a steady drip is pattering down onto the broiling stovetop and making hissing and spitting sounds. “That’s just rain blowing sideways into the flu,” says my husband. “It’s designed that way.”

“To leak in rainstorms?” I ask him. “Only really bad ones,” he says. I notice he has said nothing more about loft.

“Sausage time!” he announces to the cats, who look up blinking from their chairs by the woodstove (the only remotely warm spot in the house, over which we have been fighting them for the last three days) and sink immediately back to sleep. “Wonder if I should turn on the stove while the generator’s still running.”

“Does the manual say to do that?” I am asking him, as he switches on both fluorescent kitchen lights (ten points!!), plunks our largest frying pan on the biggest stove burner, and turns on the stove. “Sausages!!” he says, gleefully, and the generator lets out a truly terrible roar like a washing machine coming apart.

“Overload!” yells my husband. “DO something!!” yells the farmwife.

.....My husband did, indeed, make sausages. All six of them. On the woodstove. In the dark. Well, not exactly – by the light of the fiber optic Christmas tree.

I don’t like sausages. I microwaved a very large cup of coffee and a huge slice of pumpkin pie. Total points used? Don’t even ask.

The cats even let us sit in their chairs while we ate.

Happy New Year!



(first published in Western North Carolina Woman Magazine)