Global Warming, Hah! Nothing an old light bulb won't fix!

Pot on the Patio

I never thought 'twould happen!

Yesterday, fighting valiantly
against a deep depression 
brought on by cold weather--
so cold that, at night,
Jack Frost came tiptoeing in
on little cat feet--
I gathered together nearly
every root vegetable I could carry
and made a vegetable, 
beef, barley soup.  



It wasn't a very good soup, but there was a lot of it,
since I have not internalized that, in this marriage,
there are only two of us.  Do not ask me what primal urge
lies beneath that observation:  it is just a fact that
I always cook too much for too few of us.  

Our refrigerator, like many refrigerators, 
was not designed for convenience.  
The freezer is up on top, 
with the ice maker occupying one corner,
and the refrigerator space occupies the lower half,
so that the most used items are conveniently at hand
if you are three feet tall, and do not need 
adjustable shelving.  The vegetable bin 
and the meat bin are lowest down, and one of them
is located so that when the door is opened only part-way--
as is necessitated by the kitchen counter--the bin opens
only part-way, too, which is not a problem
if you are three feet tall and left-handed.

So I did what we used to do in Minnesota:
I put the pot of soup outside at night where it could freeze.
In Minnesota, in wintertime, it froze so hard 
that the pot melted before the contents did.  
Here, a teeny little crust of ice formed on top:  good enough!

We are coping.

We have fashioned two styrofoam ice chests
and two heat-producing, incandescent light bulbs
into igloos over the drip watering system controls 
to prevent the pipes from freezing.

We can see that our neighbors have covered a tree,
probably to keep the oranges or lemons from freezing,
and the tree from wimpering toward frostbite.
I have declared to all of our plants that if
they want to live in Tucson, they will have to cope, too,
without benefit of insulated blankets and old light bulbs.