Zuihitsu

[judih]

Crystallized balls ? O hell where does that get fun ?

My dog only goes outside the door far enough to piss - been like that for several days - and he's a roamer

One of my grandmothers once said, referring to a town north of here up in the St.Lawrence River country "Massena? Massena is the asshole of the world!"

16 degrees below zero here
I wonder how cold it is
in the asshole of the world ?

let's not go there

[the mingo]

let's not go there

* * -

[WIREMAN]

Crack me up!

[sasha]

Snow.

They say it falls silently.

It doesn't, not when it's this cold. It falls with a soft sibilence, a barely perceptible hiss, like the sound made by retreating surf, or by some icy cold-blooded serpent coiling around you.

White noise...

8 or 10 inches by 4 pm. It's getting dark, the wind is starting to pick up, my car is buried, and my driveway blocked by the windrow left by the town plows on their noontime pass. I couldn't escape now if I needed to.

Now Dave, my plowman, arrives, and does a half-assed job clearing my driveway. There's a mountain in front of the entry, another in front of my car, no room for me to turn it around even if I could get it up to the house - and the snow is still coming down. I don't want to admit it, but I'm beginning to feel the barest pangs of anxiety. Trapped... I put up some water for drinking, washing, & flushing, and dig out an extra blanket in the event the power goes out overnight.

But it doesn't - and by morning the wind has died down to a few occasional gusts.

My first priority is to free myself. I dig out the car & carve a hole through the windrow wide enough for me to make an escape if I need to. It looks like at least another 3 hours of digging before I can move the car and expose the mail and paper boxes.

I don't have a snowblower, nor 5 strapping sons to help me dig. Just one old fart crowding 70 with a snow shovel.

Then Dave shows up and does the other half of the ass! In 10 minutes he's made enough room for me to drive in AND back into a parking space, and taken a swipe at my mailbox. Apart from cleaning up the edges, all I had left to do was shovel a path to my compost pile and to my oil fill pipe. 20 minutes after he's left, I'm back inside with a cup of coffee to fortify me.

It's still cold as a bitch, and will be for at least 3 more days - but I've got heat, I've got lights, I've got fresh food in the fridge, and I've moved as much snow as needed to effect an emergency evac. The car sits by the front door, facing the road. For the moment I can let my guard down. The storm has passed, the klaxons fallen silent.

[the mingo]

It's gone subarctic here on the Plateau - frigid - deep snow - got a kind of poetry to it but you can have the poetry - I would like to see the temps break zero and the years to go on for awhile yet

[mnaz]

Keep on mingo. I know you have fuel to burn until the deep freeze eases, and then the road goes on.

[the mingo]

16 degrees below zero this morning, mnaz - that's the third time in the past week it's dipped down there like that and the high temp in the past week has been 6 above zero - I don't know about globally but locally boots-on-the-ground this warming they talkin' bout is a lie - the polar bears starving
above the Arctic Circle should move down here - plenty of deer to eat - if this don't break soon I'm gonna go eskimo anyway put the dogs in the traces and head out for a little seal hunting in Lake Ontario

[sasha]

I think I read that what's happening is unusually warm air is pushing up into western Canada & Alaska, displacing their usual arctic air mass. All that cold air's gotta go somewhere, and we drew the short straw.

By the end of the week, we might be looking at temps in the mid 40s.... wouldn't break my heart if we do....

[mnaz]

I think I heard it was called the "polar vortex" or some such thing. Bad news...

[sasha]

Sunshine, and - mirabile dictu - temperature above freezing! Those big brown chunks of ice clinging to the rocker panels and fender wells have finally dropped away, the ice daggers depending from the eaves are shriveling like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy douses her with water, the frozen hardpack on the town roads is turning to slush. It's hard walking in that stuff because you can't get a strong push-off, your feet slide back with each step - you end up expending more effort for less locomotion. It's like walking in sand. We chugged along for about 2-1/2 miles yesterday along a softening snowmobile track, and my bum was sore for the effort this morning.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. Just sayin'. Trade-offs. One I'm more than happy to make.

Swanzey Oil made a delivery this morning, and after logging the date, the amount, and the cost in the spreadsheet I maintain to track usage (I'm a data junkie, remember), the vicious cold from which we've just emerged shows up as an impressive spike in the number of gallons per day I burned: 5.6. Since 1990, I've burned on average 3.25 gal/day over the same time period (plus or minus a gallon or so). There was a similar spike in Nov-Dec 2007 of around 5.5 gal/day, presumably another cold snap. I'll need to correlate it to the temperature records I keep from my electric bill to know for sure, but it's too nice a day to spend it number wanking, tempting though it is.

[the mingo]

Think high 40's today - softer air comin' in from somewhere, temps been rising steady a degree at a time all night - makes me want to go into a
syntax spasm - yabba dabba doboo

[judih]

i sit back quietly
a little dental surgery yesterday
no pain today
and i'm back to imagining living in freezing climates
the you-must-be-kidding response when i'd walk outside
how a degree closer to normal was a party-day
and how i said 'Shalom' to that interaction
warmer weather,
different reasons for you-must-be-kidding

[the mingo]

judih for two weeks temps below zero some of them w-a-y below but today it's 53 degrees and raining with fog so thick I'd swear I was on the coast and not the Plateau - what wood I have is so wet it probably won't burn until sometime around June - send me some of that Sinai sunshine and low humidity please, 'bout 4 solid days of it ought to about do it

[sasha]

better find some dry wood, 'cause next week it's gonna get cold again - not as cold as the last few weeks, but cold enough to turn all this rain-soaked snow into concrete. I spent part of this morning shoveling away the stuff that slid off my roof overnight, because by Sunday you'll need C4 to break up the piles.......

[judih]

desert warmth, i can do.
haven't been to sinai since '78,
also no wood worth mentioning
but i could ship off some rosemary bushes, a little sage