Lunar Eclipse

Went to bed early, so I could get back up and watch a celestial event, but, of course, I couldn't see it, because the sky was occluded with water vapor of one form or another. The ten years in western Colorado stand out, in that I could always see the stars. It's not a big deal, we miss almost everything all the time. Something or other disrupts our line of sight. The staff was particularly cordial to me today and it made me suspicious. They could fire me, I mean really, I'm good at some things, but I'm a pain in the ass about others. There's always a dynamic involved, when two or more people work together. It's why I choose to be alone, as much of my time as I can manage. It's weird, isn't it? the way other people are full of shit, and we see the only righteous path. The bridge is done, it's finished, like a set if stairs might be. I drive across as if it was always there. Bridge. Over stream. Check. I have a load of laundry to do, I need to stop at Kroger, and buy a few things, sustenance, and I need to oil my beaver traps. It's just a list of things, I can do that. What would I be doing anyway? The rotation for Saturday Staff is down to me for the next three weeks. Met TR at the pub for lunch, then we spent several hours going through the three volumes of Emily's letter to identify which letters we'd used in the show. A pleasant diversion. Got Michael Pollan's "Cooked" at the library, and did get my laundry done. Pegi's kids were drifting in as I left. I have to start stocking the house for winter, always an interesting chore; and I thought about it on the way home. A case of wine and a case of whiskey, two one-pound bags of tobacco and about ten packets of papers. Ten packets of instant Ida-Reds, ten pounds of pintos, ten pounds of black beans, ten cans of tomato soup, several pounds of butter, 32 ounces of olive oil, some smoked ham hocks in the freezer, ten pounds of rice (several different varieties), I'll catch the packages of diced ham on sale, and freeze them against winter bean soups. I'm fine on chilies. Ten cans of baked beans I can have on toast. I have to carry in eggs and the multi-grain bread I favor. The object is to limit the load. I need to increase my supply of drinking water, and press another five-gallon pickle bucket (from the pub) into service for wash water. Mostly I melt snow for wash water in winter. The cookstove is going anyway, and I have a dedicated dustpan I use as a scoop. It's a mindless chore I do on a day that I'm just sitting around, reading. Melted snow has usually picked up some particulate matter, and I pour it through a tee-shirt filter. I get four filter-cloths from an old tee-shirt, two from the front and two from the back; I washed a couple of officially dead tee-shirts today, and cut them to size. I store them in a neat pile on the shelf above the refrigerator, in a nook beneath the stairs, where I also store hats and gloves and scarves. Hunter's Moon is when you start getting your winter act together. It could dip below freezing tomorrow night. Not here, where the chill rolls off the ridge, but down in the valleys, where the coldness tends to pool. I'll pay for this later, when the cold winds blow, but right now, it feels pretty good.