Water Everywhere

The county under flood advisory, the Ohio out of its banks and the Scioto way spread into the bottom land. The debris fields will be enormous. If I don't post for a few days it means an ice storm. We're right on the edge, calling for snow here, but parts of Kentucky get freezing rain first. I could do a year without an ice storm, lovely as they are. Carried in another large pack tonight, figuring meals in my head. Trying to get the kitchen sink area warm enough to shave and take a sponge bath. Took down all the hanging hardware from the Circus Show, a great mound of stuff, more anchors than I've ever used before, tie-off cleats, for god's sake, every 'J' hook in town (two holes drilled in the top of the leg, the hook hangs perpendicular to the wall, we use them for paintings that hang with 'D' rings) and the usual assortment of improvised hangers. Need to spend a day sorting. Board Meeting today, with Pegi and D attending. Budget stuff. Pegi was a nervous wreck. D was dressed sort of fancy. After the meeting we conferred about the roof drainage, accepting a bid to do what I first proposed; and here we are, after years of thinking about the problem, probably going to fix something that had really seemed unfixable. Maybe everything is fixable, if you throw enough money at it, but this isn't even going to cost that much, a few thousand, a bargain, I think, considering that it completely changes the drainage of an essentially flat roof behind parapets. The problem was so complex, it took years to get all the correct information. There was so much miss-information, so many mistakes had been made, so many people had just their own small involvement, knew nothing about nothing. I think the power company used the storm drain as a chase for some cables, capped it with concrete, we know now the interior drain (the main drain, the scupper is purely overflow) goes nowhere. And that's the water that ends up in the basement. I know it is because I poured some dye in at the top of the interior drain and I couldn't get down three floors before the evidence was transparent. I remembered the last foundation for a house I built in Telluride, we no longer had a plumber who set sections of pipe through the foundation walls; we had a guy who could drill through anything, and the plumber came later. It's a better system, really, if you know someone with a really good set of drill-bits. You drill the holes where they need to be rather than where you imagine they should be. I manage tense well, for a white guy. What is normal? Lost power, but it was back this morning. I think I lost a few lines. I do the Send Later thing fairly often when the weather is bad. Down to single digits tonight, and for several days, so when I get home from work today, I split out some very dry starter sticks, to expedite certain and fast fires. Should be able to drive up tomorrow morning and unload some dead red oak, then again tomorrow night with water and supplies. Carried another heavy pack in tonight, in case things get out of hand, extra juice, makings for a meat loaf, half-and-half, an extra pound of coffee. I eat salads, often, for lunch at the pub, so I don't have to carry in leafy greens, which often don't survive the trek. I often wrap an avocado in bubble-wrap. And think I'll probably pick up some very hard ones tomorrow. The way this goes, that I can likely get in and out twice tomorrow, and that well might be it for February, everything else I'll carry on my back. Also, I can get another load of the red oak. Here in the heart of the hardwood zone, so much wood is wasted. As predicted, the ice-storm dead trees from the last several years are threatening the phone lines on Mackletree. The phone company hires a couple of locals, or just as often the next guy that comes along with a chainsaw, cuts up the offending tree and tosses it onto the verge. Nobody wants to lift something too heavy, so they conveniently cut it into perfect pieces, Pre-Cuts (Kurt and Kim call them, and I love the name) and don't want or need them. I can easily get next year's firewood from a two mile stretch of road, and I likely will, but I'll still drop a dozen young trees, 30 years old maybe, because I need to drop live trees if I want to coppice; which I see as a kind of social security, where I could go out, slightly demented, with just a bow-saw, and make my nut. I sometimes burn furniture. Had to say that, because there was a chair, next to the shattered chest, it was ash, and broken, so I burned it. It made me laugh. Call up the chairs. I might start buying chairs, at auction, as a kind of insurance policy. Sometimes they're really cheap and a hardwood chair, on a cold night, is a definite perk. If I had bought all of the oak school desks at a recent auction, millions of BTU's for 50 dollars, I'd be a rich man. As it is, I slog through the snow, what are you going to do? It's the sound of music. I enjoy slogging through the snow, it's a part of my life, you see things and court frostbite, you make a miss-step and you probably die. Authentic, but in a minor key. I don't exist to be challenged, I live the way I do because it satisfies some fundamental need. Break it down, you either want to take care of yourself or you want someone to take care of you. I'm a little testy because even the way I go out of town is flooded and I have to seek another route. If I can just get home, I have a meal planned. I know I can start a fire. Fuck the world, its various demands, I'm a monad of the particular. Even that sounds heroic, which I don't mean at all. Ed Sanders wrote a great poem about shooting rats at the dump, which is closer to the point. I have to go, it's getting very cold, I'm considering hibernation.