The downside of winter

I love winter, yes, but the car heater is broken. The mechanic says we need to replace the heater core. Maybe in a few months we can aford that done.This means that when we go someplace, we have to dress for sitting still outside. Hemi likes it least. He ends up so bundled up that, with his short baby legs, he can hardly stagger along. Beau could care less, as long as I let him kick snow. Hemi doesn't like snow anyway. He hasn't grown into it yet.
I restacked the canned food yesterday. It is in old babywipe boxes. Eventually I will cover them with something, likely an old sheet.
One of my students' mothers, M, who is an obsesive-organizer type, asked about the boxes a couple weeks ago at her son's lesson. I explained they were canned food that I didn't have anywhere else to store. M and family are good Mormons. She suggested we should build more cupboards, but had trouble finding a place to put them at. Being a food horder, in Mormon country, is not a questionable activity. No one asks why. Which is one nice thing about living here. Having two children is also not a questionable activity. Except for the "Are you going to have another soon?" sort of questions.
That's about the only thing I miss about the house we used to live in: storage space. Old houses do have that, at least around here. I got my gas bill for last month. $35. Compared to over $200 at the old place at this time last year. Even though the state let the gas company raise the prices by 25%. And I have the heat turned up two degrees higher. (I think. The controls at the old place were so varied, the baseboards didn't have degrees on them, and every room had to be set differently depending on whether it had forced air as well as baseboard, and if the baseboards in the rooms around it worked or not.
Okay, I miss having twice as much square footage, too. But this place is warm and snug, and it has twice as many bathrooms.