Cold Snap

Got the woodstove going again.  Cold weather has returned to our bit of paradise.  The greenhouse plants are shivering like chihuahuas, I'm sure.  Poor things.  I had to stay late at work to help shroud the annuals from the expected chill tonight.  This necessity torpedoed my hope to zip over to the INK meeting tonight before it got too late for some critiquing and planning of our writerly futures.  Weatherman says snow, maybe, down to 1000 feet or so.  I wonder if I'll wake up to the whitest April 19th I've ever experienced.  Questions I haven't had to concern myself with are popping up.  How will the peonies and clematis fare?  Will this stunt my poor asian pear trees?  Do fumes from oil lamps harm seedlings?  Shivering minds want to know.

At least we have water, and lots of it.  Turns out the new tank can keep keep our water running for some time once it's pressurized without the pump having to step in and work like mad.  I wonder, now that the pump's workload is much easier, if it might not give up the ghost, poor thing.  It's been overworked for who knows how many years and now, with a normal load, it may not just settle, but collapse.  

In the meantime, though, we have water, heat, shelter, food, all the niceties of modern life keeping us comfortable.  As for the wild things--good luck, and I hope you make it through the cold snap.

Birds and Hazards

We had heavy (for this area) snowfall last night while we slept.  I love waking up to snow, and quiet, and the swarms of birds that snow always brings.  (Note to self--refill the feeders.)  I swept off the tile downstairs where I keep my bird supplies and dumped the sweepings onto the snow.  In minutes, three juncos had found the pile and started scratching through it.

The motion attracted Huntress.  She started talking to them in the language of the birds.  I don't think they understood her.  She has a really thick accent.  She kept trying, though.  They ignored her, poor thing.

I went in to work late, when I felt comfortable with driving.  The roads were good on the way to work, and on the way back home, but just before I got to the house I noticed there was still traces of slush in the road.  If it freezes tonight, it could be nasty, though not all the way down the hill.  The trick is to get past the ice without ditching and making it onto the lower, dry or merely wet part of the road.  The other trick is to have that instinct that tells you that the steep curves near the bottom of the hill are safe.  Many a driver trying to commute into town has listened to their instinct and been oh so wrong.  They've been wrong enough that the folks living on the downhill side of the curves got tired of people ending up in their cow pasture, so they built up a huge berm.  

If only cars were as proportionally durable as a skateboard, you could bank off the berm down the next stretch and look pretty cool in the process.  Of course the last curve has no berm and you'd then end up off the side of the road on a steep hill crushed against a tree.  What we really need there, since the slope is too steep to rationally attempt to build a berm there, is one of those cement half-pipes set on its side.  Then not only could you use it to negotiate the curve, you could also flip a loop with your car.  Not even the Dukes of Hazzard pulled off a stunt like that.

Must ... finish ... projects ... Plus, Andrea gets shoes

I'm typing with my new, wonderful, deep purple fingerless gloves that a friend knitted for me. It's cold in the office, where yesterday's weather likes to linger, and they're perfectly warming especially across my wrists where I often suffer pain from carpal tunnel syndrome.

Rory reminded me that I'm neglecting my poor office. I've tiled the minimum space and then I abandoned the finishing work for "later." You all know about later, that mythical future time when there will be peace on Earth and no one will have to earn a living, when houses will paint themselves and my favorite peony will be worshipped as a goddess in certain circles.

Or maybe your later is different.

Anyway, it's past time to finish this puppy, er, office, off. I have to finish tiling first, tiling which I enjoy once I've got all my duckies in a row and put on some music. It takes about an hour to lay five tiles, not counting cutting time, and I've gotten to a stage where just about every tile will need to be cut. I think I've got six, maybe seven uncut tiles to go.

But this is all blathering, thinking about work that needs to be done. At the root of all this is a desire to finish. I want to finish Masks. I want to finish the office, and the porch project, and the vegetable garden (although finishing anything in a gardening sense is even more mythical than later.) There's too much juggling and it's time to set some of the pieces down.

This is probably all brought on by the work schedule. The day after tomorrow, I'm off. I'm free I'm free I'm free! Yee! Just for a day, but that's enough compared to, well, no day. I'd like to finish something that day.

In other news, my daughter Andrea and I went shoe shopping today. I got a pair of shoes for work that are, ahem, somewhat un-work like but I don't think anyone will look close enough to notice. They enclose the toe and the heel, a requirement. They are not sneakers. Voila! Perfect. (Don't mind the skull and crossbones print all over them--it just looks like a geometric design from a distance and who looks at my feet anyway? So there!) Andrea picked up her first set of heels for her 8th grade end of year celebration. I can get all teary-eyed at how my little girl is growing up and choosing (she actually planned on borrowing my heels--which I needed for work and that's how we decided we both needed at least one pair of 'other' shoes) to wear nice shoes and nice clothes to a ceremonial event. Instead of being teary-eyed, though, I'm just so very proud of her it makes me grin. I think she's realized that her jeans and t-shirt lifestyle is a safe place to be and that being safe all the time won't get her to where she wants to go. So she's trying something different, and it's very awesome. You go, Andrea! Mom won't cry. You're not going away. You're becoming (in more ways than one) and that makes me happy.

Misty, aka Mistah Fluff, our long-haired gray mackerel kitty, has leapt on my lap and declared "meh-eh." And now she's purring like crazy.

You said it Mistah. Meh eh!