Deep Freeze

Dipping to 10 degrees tonight, so I came home early to get a fire going. Thank god for bean soup. Slow at the museum, getting the theater ready for the Cirque's "Winterscape" and talking with D about cleaning and painting the kitchen floor. It takes a beating. An edge of ice around the lake. I stopped to feed stale crackers to the ducks. Considered my movements for the next few days. To a certain extent, I have to be opportunistic in winter. Saturday, for instance, I don't really need to go to town, but I'll be able to drive up a frozen driveway, so I will go to town, back-up a few supplies, the heavy things, juice, drinking water, milk, cream, chicken stock (of which I'm using record amounts, since I started drinking so much as a hot beverage), canned things, and eggs. I hate walking in on eggs, walking in with eggs, I mean, as it's often a disaster. You find yourself standing at the sink, wiping down the 11 survivors and transferring them to another carton. Not that it happens often, but often enough that I avoid it when I can. As a special treat I'll lunch at the pub and have a beer, as they now have Newcastle Brown Ale on tap and it is one of the great beers of the world. And there's some dead dry wood down at the clear-cut on Mackletree, where the fire came through, and there's no reason not to pick some up. In the wind storm, a few large snags dislodged, and I dragged one home, after I achieved the ridge this afternoon. I love this life, rooted in the real. If you don't have a thermostat, you tend to be more engaged with the natural world. Just a comment, not an argument. I was talking with Tammy today, about lifestyles, realized had radically different mine was from anyone else I knew. But I'm not trying to make a point. I just try and be as comfortable as I can, given wherever I find myself. The soup is even better. Funny. At the museum today someone ask me about the power outage and I explained that I made soup at the cookstove by candlelight, and they asked why I didn't bring them some. Because it was so good, I said, I wanted to keep it for myself. I might take them a sample, to show where the bean soup can go, but, really, when something like this happens, you eat it all as quickly as possible, and guard your space with elbows. It's great, the best thing I've made in ages. Maybe it's the corn-sticks I made with the cornmeal Joel sent, buttering ever bite, beware my heart. Doctrine of Signatures would mandate I die on the driveway, struggling home with cream for my coffee, and butter, to butter every bite. I can't believe I write the way I do, with such assurance, I'm only opinionated if you ask the right questions. In the matter of bean soups, I am a master, I can't deny, that in any competition this pot would win a metal. Taste and mouth-feel, it's off the scale, nothing more you could ask.