Doing Nothing

I needed to stay off my foot for a while, so I drank coffee and read all day. Tomorrow, still thinking I might get to town and back up the hill with the truck. Which necessitates a major list and an examination of my lifestyle. Clean clothes, so I want to take a bath, which means melting snow from the north sides of things, then filtering it through old tee-shirts, heating it in the canning kettle. All day affair. I make my nearly instant clam chowder for lunch, both halves of a small acorn squash for dinner, one half stuffed with a sausage mixture and the other half stuffed with a raspberry/ currant-jam mixture. I'm thinking about ordering a rechargeable battery-powered head lamp, so I can keep both hands free. This fumbling around in the dark shit, trying to focus a flashlight you're holding in your armpit, is too god-damn much. I'd like to see what I'm looking at. Slept fitfully, up early, after coffee and breakfast walked over to the driveway and judged it too soft for egress. Maybe Tuesday. Enough of a fire to make an egg noodle, meat, tomato, cheese dish that I can eat for several days; then I let the fire die, as the temps rise. Warmest day of the year, and maybe 55 degrees tomorrow. I spend some time organizing the woodshed, envisioning order, then out into the woods; a scouting mission, really, but I take the bow-saw. I want to harvest 50-100 saplings for next year's starter sticks, 2" at the base, I don't care particularly what species, red maple, poplar, oak. These would be mostly about 16 feet long, cut into two eight foot lengths, upright in a corner of the shed. There are small fields of these, wherever a mature tree was felled or fell damage to the major ice-storm a few years ago. Thick uniform stands that need thinning. I already have next year's kindling, in the form of two fairly resinous pine boles. There's an interesting couple of loads at the wood dump now, where one of the tree removal crews cut everything useful into firewood, but there's a huge pile of oak crotches, where a major branch split off from the main trunk. These are difficult to deal with, and no one else will take them, so they're mine for the taking. I like working on them, mid-winter, kneeling on my foam pad. I'll start hauling them home tomorrow, next winter is just around the corner.