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whittled out of the same material
Monday, January 8 2018
Since I sleep best in the recuperation fort, it's nearly always me who sleeps there with the dogs (or dog, depending on where Ramona ends up).
This morning when I took Neville out for his breakfast constitutional, it felt positively balmy outside. It was great not to suit up with a scarf and gloves and hat or even a jacket. Mind you, the temperature was still 25 degrees Fahrenheit, a completely normal morning temperature for the coldest time of year in this climate. But that was a good 24 degrees warmer than it had been only yesterday morning. The cats seemed to be in agreement with my reptilian brain that spring had finally arrived after two or three weeks of unrelenting arctic weather, and all of them went outside at various points today to frolick around in the snow.
Partly because the Subaru hadn't been able to start, I hadn't left the house on my own in a long time and was suffering from the typical symptoms of cabin fever. So this morning I went on some errands in the Prius (joined, at the last second, by Ramona). We drove out to the Tibetan Center thrift store, where one can find LCD computer monitors covered in several inches of snow. I hadn't been there since before Christmas, and expected things to be a bit different there. But it was still largely as it had been, with the same old film cameras and first-generation iPhone speaker docks nobody wants. For a dollar, though, I bought a bluetooth audio receiver, becsause you can never have too many of those.
My next and only other real destination was Lowes, where I mostly just wanted to buy some black caulk for repairing what remains of the "oops, I dropped it on a marble floor" damage to my main laptop, Hyrax. While there, I bought more phillips bits for my screw gun(s) and a many-elemented contour gauge (allowing me to copy the edge of a two dimensional slice of reality). That last one was a bit of an impulse purchase.
When I stopped to drop off a package (yet another Swatch that Gretchen had decided was too big and manly) at the post office in Hurley, the adjacent Stewarts had an almost festive quality to it. That's what a 25 degree day after a zero degree day can do. But even on days like this, there's still a dreary monochrome post-apocalyptic quality to the world. It's not just the snow; it's also the layer of salt covering the cars and every exposed surfaces, making it all appear as if it had been whittled out of the same material.
Back at the house, I tried again to start up the Subaru using jumper cables attached to the Prius. I'd tried this yesterday when it had been one degree Fahrenheit (I never give windchill factors, that was the actual temperature) and I had been unsuccessful. Part of the problem is that it is impossible to rev the engine of a Prius, so you can never get that little extra jumper voltage on a brutally cold day. Today, though, the Subaru leapt immedately to life, so I left it on for about a half hour afterwards so it would charge its own battery. I should mention that yesterday in the engine compartment of the Prius I'd found evidence of some sort of varmint (probably a chipmunk) trying to create a nest. The varmint had torn the yellow fiberglass insulation out from beneath the hood and made a cup of it down between two of the engine components. There was no evidence of the varmint still being there, but he or she had left a terrible mess.
Meanwhile, according to Gretchen, after I'd left Neville had become so sad and lonely that he'd somehow broken out of his recuperation fort, gone upstairs, and joined Gretchen in bed. He's not supposed to be climbing stairs at this stage of his recovery, so this was a bad thing. Fortunately, he didn't seem to experience any ill effects from having done this.
The fine folks at the rescue organization from which we got Neville have helped pay for his knee surgeries, and as a token of appreciation, Gretchen wanted me to make a painting of Neville. So that was one of the tasks I accomplished today. The painting ended up being a four by four inch enlargement of a 2.5 by 2.5 inch I'd done at the lake in August of 2016, though I also made some modifications based on looking at Neville this evening. Here are the results:
The painting.
Double-flip version.
Double-flip with half replaced by
We did indeed start burning the firewood in our last tranche today. Hopefully it will be enough for the rest of the winter. If not, there's always the annex (and plenty of unprocessed wood in several staging areas).
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