Stuck in South Dakota Blizzard!

A few weeks ago, Jonathan, Danny, Tim and I spent about ten days in South Dakota.

I already wrote about the first few days when we were working on our own house, but then we battened everything down and moved to the Rosebud parsonage where we were going to work during what was forecast to be a blizzard. 

And a blizzard it was, putting down a lot of snow, blowing like crazy, and leaving drifts several feet high. 

Inside, it felt like a dungeon. All the windows on both main floor and basement were boarded up to deter vandals--like the vandals who had already torn out a great deal of wiring and copper tubing a while back. We were supposed to get some of the mess cleaned up and some wiring done and planning toward a work team coming this next year.

I had been nervous about staying at this parsonage during a blizzard, especially if the electricity would go off. There was  no wood stove like we had back in Colorado--where we could both heat the house and do our cooking, as you can see in the picture! And at first, there was not even a fridge or cook stove! But at the last minute, we'd been able to get both a refrigerator and stove that Society of Indian Missions provided for the parsonage. The stove was on Facebook marketplace hardly out of our way to Rosebud. Jonathan and the boys loaded it onto the trailer, along with a fridge later, and so at least I was able to stock food and cook.

 Jonathan had a commercial size propane heater, and he fired that thing up, and in twenty minutes it would have a room heated up. He set it in the basement and fixed the furnace fan system to where he could turned on a fan which would blow the warm air through the house.

 Jonathan and Tim discovered that two of the heat registers had been covered up with flooring since the former occupants had used a wood stove, so Tim cut holes in the flooring so that we could heat the house.

  So most of the time I kept warm enough, and when I got too cold, I'd turn on the oven in the electric stove and open the door.

The worst thing we had to deal with was thousands of flies. 

And I'm not exaggerating when I say thousands. Maybe there were a million, but that might be an exaggeration! Flies were all over the one window that was not boarded up, and dead flies lay all over the sink and counter and floor! 

I swept up hundreds of flies upstairs, and Jonathan vacuumed up thousands more  two or three times a day down in the basement where flies covered certain beams in the ceiling so thick they were black!

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Blizzard or not, I was determined to have a clean window! And it's true that as soon as I killed all the flies I could, within an hour dozens more would be all over the window. But you don't just let the flies beat you! We kept at it, and by the end of the time we were there, most of the flies had been conquered!

Down in the "dungeon" of the basement, the boys tore down old drywall.

Jonathan gave the boys instructions before he set to work on wiring.

Upstairs he and the boys figured out which outlets and lights were on which circuits. 

And I put on a mask to go downstairs to help clean up some moldy drywall. 

This was a job I could do! 

Tim is not the kind to just put up with a dungeon if there is something that can be done about it.

There was this one single comfy chair already there, and we made a cozy little corner that helped us survive those days of South Dakota blizzard! It doesn't take much!

He found this little live edge shelf that he had built and we'd stored in this parsonage garage with the rest of our stuff we'd moved up here. And I found the lamp and a second corner shelf. 

The one day when the snow wasn't blowing too terribly, Tim dressed up warmly and decided to do a photo shoot. I had scrounged up a Christmas wreath from our Christmas bins in the garage, and he took that out with him.

It's true he had to make his own picture, but he did. 

With me kinda sneaking up behind to shoot the shoot.

I just love how Tim finds ways to make beauty out of ugliness.

 

And so here he is getting a really good shot--which ended up on a photo calendar later! 

 Meanwhile, indoors, I kept busy keeping food on for three hungry men, getting Christmas letters addressed, and writing on my Honduras missionary story that is supposed to become a book someday. 

At night, Tim couldn't bear the darkness, so this is what he found. He also found a little string of colored lights which we put around the one kitchen window that wasn't boarded up.

                                                                                                   Cozy!   The next post will tell about digging out.