Butter pats

     My husband likes his butter soft.  Room temperature.  Slithery, so he can put a paper thin coating upon every square inch of his toast, or bagels.  He doesn't bother with butter for pancakes, french toast or biscuits.  I, on the other hand, like cold chunks of butter, warming on the toast, soaking in rich yellow puddles.  On cold bread the bits of butter are like rocks in a sea of jam.  Yuummmmmm!
     Mostly, we've left the butter out on the table in a covered butter dish.  If I needed cold butter I resorted to a half-unwrapped stick in the door of the Fridge.
     Last August he began to complain that the butter was "off".  People of our age will have no trouble interpreting this as "inedible", not fresh, saddened, altered.  So I started putting the butter out a half stick at a time.  Winter came and the  question was shelved in favor of another one:  "why is the butter so hard"?  I moved a table over to the wood stove so we could toast ourselves while eating our toasted bread.
     This year spring was long and cool.  In fact I have only now, this week, finally put the winter clothes away.  About the first of June, I turned the air conditioner on.  The house was warm.  The butter spoiled on the table between one supper and the next.  After some thought I came up with the idea of using just butter pats.  Enough for one meal, you see.  Small enough to come to room temperature while I cook the meal (assuming I remember to get them out first).  I even had some tiny plates meant for butter pats which I had purchased for pennies as doll dishes for the Dolls' Christmas party.  But in all this, the fact my calculating brain refused to acknowledge was that the heating and cooling system was not working.  Finally I called a repair service.  Our condenser was only 10 years old.  We'll fix it!  Not so.  Owing to poor installation, it was dead.  And now the problems arise.  What used to cost $1500 now costs $5000.  It's a heat pump and they all appear to be made in China.  The reviews are mostly negative.  I have for some time tried to boycott things made in China on the grounds of health issues.  Now it seems there are quality issues too.  Kerosene furnaces are no longer available (delivered with a snicker suggesting I'm very stupid).  Natural gas is all around me but to have a line run onto my property will cost $9000 if  my neighbor will consent but it seems he doesn't want gas on his property.  I have brought the fans down from the loft over the garage.  I close up the house about 10 am and open the windows again in the evening.  I put a thermometer on the front porch so I could see the exact moment the temperature went low enough to open the windows.  We sleep with a fan on us.  So far so good, but it's not August yet!  Still, our house is partially underground so we're good candidates for doing without air conditioning.  But heating with wood completely means never being gone over-night if it's cold enough to freeze your pipes.  It means getting up in the night to stoke the stove.  Buying wood has it's problems too.      
     Well, I'm still doing research, how 'bout radiant heating?  I like the idea of warming wires installed in the floor, (this does mean I get a new floor?).  There are German and Swedish electric units which are installed room to room like window air conditioners.  I am surprised by the reactions of loan managers and workmen alike that we would take our time and do without the a/c for a month or two.  They seem to think no one could live without it, and I suppose that's true if you live in the city in an apartment.
     We're in our last four days of the grocery saga but we haven't run out of anything.  This week we will be waiting for the flyers to come advertising next weeks sales and if they come by Wednesday we get to choose which sale we'll patronise.  That's the most excitement we're likely to get, at out age.  The mail comes about 2:30 so if I don't like the future sale, I may say, get your shoes on, we're going shopping now!