All In

Consider the earthworm. Various alga. Krill. So tired and sore my brain is misfiring. On the other hand, everything on the list is done. Another 5 hours working on firewood. All stations full. The new technique of splitting problem pieces allowed me to heat the house all day with what should have been waste wood. Skipped the Portuguese dish and went right to the odd chili, cubed two pounds of pork loin, cooked in chicken stock with onions and peppers, lots of salt and black pepper, and cooked a pound of Pinto beans while I was working outside. Came inside after 3 o'clock and put water on to heat (melted snow) and read for an hour. At 4 o'clock the house was warmer than it would be for the rest of the week, so I stripped, took a sponge bath, shaved, washed my hair. So I'm clean, I have a great pot of odd chili, and all the firewood stations are full, but the absolute highlight of the day was the appearance of the fox. Everything I did today was by hand, so I wasn't making a lot of noise, she was coming up the old logging road, I stopped what I was doing, splitting kindling right then, and waited to see if we would interact or not, it's always her choice. She seemed frisky, I stood and tossed her a piece of jerky I had in my pocket. She pounced on it, chewed it just a few times and swallowed. Then she dipped her head into the snow, shook her head, then bounced up and down a couple of times, all four feet off the ground, rolled in the snow, shook-off like a wet dog, then walked right by me, ten feet away, clearly flirting, and trotted off down the graveyard path. Made my day, made up for a lot of sore. My hands are beat up, they're at the forefront of my interface with the world, and suffer because of it. Lots of nicks and small burns. I was especially careful today, coming in and out, because the back porch is a sheet of ice. It's not really dangerous, because there are so many tread marks from my work-boots and new snow actually adds traction. When it gets really cold, I can just break this ice with a hammer, but right now, before it contracts, the ice is frozen into the fibers of the wood, and any attempt at removal would do more damage than good. Walk carefully, which is never bad advice, watch where your foot falls. I made some cornbread sticks with the Georgia cornmeal. They are so good they beg the question, which I forget, what was that, again? Why do these old cast iron pans make seven sticks? It's the old up, down, up, down, up, down, up: issue, where you end up with your foot in the same place. Like with joists and rafters it's always plus one, so it's usually an odd.number. Numbers don't mean anything, but we watch them recur, sometimes there seems to be a pattern. I have to go read for a couple of hours, I'm so clean, I squeak against the sheets..