All My Days

[Forgive my liberties]

"Many a night I found myself with no friends standing near
I cried aloud
I shook my hands
What am I doing here
All of these days
For I look around me
And my eyes confound me
And it's just too bright
As the days keep turning into night"

-Alexi Murdoch

Alabama

There's some property there I'm interested in. But mostly, being painfully, brutally honest, I miss:

1. My friends there
2. The mild winters there
3. Racism

Basically in that order.

It's an itch I may need to scratch, either to get it out of my system, or to see if I irritate it enough to let it get infected.

A road trip is being planned tentatively. Moonpie riding shotgun, Cat holding down the fort.

(Or, you know, maybe Vermont.)

Venting, A Wood Stove

So, yeah, the starter on the '90 plow truck went out after I got it stuck down the lane. But it's not the starter. But that's okay, because it could only be about 584 other things which I don't understand. No biggie, because it's not like there's another blizzard coming through tomorrow night and Wednesday.

Power steering gone in the '89.

I don't know why I whine. I have more than I need, really. Moonpie and I will go into town first thing tomorrow and supply up (dog food, cat food, chocolate covered sugar bombs, etc.). The rest of the day she and I will cut wood -- a huge, huge walnut tree that blew down year before last along the east creek. A good stove in here, a good stove out in the tool shed. What more could anyone want?

(2 hours of Amish shunning on PBS tomorrow night is what.)

She's getting old. She'll only stay out there with me for about an hour, then she'll wander back to the homestead. Hopefully she'll have the courtesy to die when the ground isn't frozen.

Snow Falling on Cedars

Here we go again already. -18's a killer, but at least the wind is remorseless. Cat seems to find herself operating as a hot water bottle, alternating betwixt me and Moonpie.

If I were a Norwegian Bachelor Farmer, I'd be half in the bag in my whiskey cups. But I'm not Norwegian.

"Enough tea and biscuits to sink a ship", Ian Holm? Really?

This could be an interesting next few days. The last time it was this cold in this part of our country was almost exactly 20 years ago. I was renting the farmhouse on Jess's property, but I was ferrying firewood from his place to mom and dad's house about 2 hours away.

I expect to lose running water. I don't have a lot of confidence in the wood supply -- some of it is near perfect, but there's just not a lot of it out by the tool shed to split, which I should be doing right now instead of watching football. But most of the stuff I cut yesterday is waterlogged and spongy, i.e., useless when it's this cold.

I'm hoping the batch I cut this morning is as good as it looks.

Cat has her 4 week follow up vet appointment tomorrow at 4pm. Not much snow yet. But if it starts to blow across the lane, I don't know that the plow truck will start, given it's leaking antifreeze.

However, Moonpie is excellent company, I have plenty of dog and cat food, so I may as well stage various scenes from The Day After Tomorrow to keep us busy.

And 4 hours of Downton tonight.

Oops. Forgot.

I moved up here exactly 3 years ago.

Cat's doing great. But Dog is slowing down. A little. I'll be honest: A slower Moonpie, even if it's just a step or two, makes me anxious and sad.

Of Mice And Men

So the guy I do tractor business with stopped by last night because someone had abandoned a days-old kitten at his shop. He thought for some reason that I needed/wanted a kitten/cat. I don't. I don't like cats. Moonpie doesn't like cats. I said, "Absolutely not."

So now I have a days-old kitten in a little crate just off the east door with a small cup of water and a small plate of tuna. God help me it's not a bad looking cat, and Moonpie could certainly use some help with the field mice. If it survives, it'll be treated like a barn cat, a really well-treated barn cat.

Oh, and I was sober for 2 years yesterday. Today I'm sober for 2 years and 1 day. I was working on the mini-truck yesterday morning and kind of forgot.