Big Winds

Power was off for hours again today, two times in three days, and the weather is nice. Big winds created a leaf storm, and I put off a trip to town, stayed home and watched. Pretty spectacle. Rodney's coming up early tomorrow, to deer hunt in the morning, then finish the insulation. Either tomorrow or Monday I've got to suck it up and go wait in the waiting room at Family Services to get my vouchers. I put a book in the Jeep (a John D. MacDonald) for when I feel up to it and it's not too crowded. Rodney will cut and split a batch larger than a voucher load for $100 as a back-up pile. I need to clean out the woodshed. Crap accumulates out there, because there's a roof. An old semi-rotten oak table top I need to smash up for kindling, some sticks I'd dragged out of the woods, some burls. There's a brisk trade now in burls, I cut them out, dry them in the shed or under the house, and give them to people that turn bowls. Lathes always scared me. Of late, I won't take an elevator. In all honesty I even mistrust the ground I'm walking on. Reading a John Banville, he won the Man Booker in 2005. It's quite good, complex, and written in the slightly different English of the Irish. It's good enough that I decide at the first sign of bad weather I'll go to the library and get a few more of them. Reading matter figures importantly in the winter plan. I want to write a piece this winter, that in my head I'm currently calling Considering Baffles, which would be, more or a less, a treatise about cooking on a woodstove. I thought about that today because I was cleaning around and under the stove. Found a cast-iron restoration project I had forgotten about, another winter task; and I need to clean and re-season the six or eight pieces of cookware that tend to get left out during the warm months. The fried-egg skillet, the omelet skillet, the bacon skillet, and that new/old skillet, pretty funky, in which I've taken to frying potatoes in butter with various peppers and adobo. In winter these are all cleaned after use and hung from the beam over the kitchen area. In summer they migrate around to flat surfaces. I love seeing them all hanging. It's a comfort, or more likely a frolic. I had a small fire tonight, it was down to 38 degrees, and caramelized a pan of carrots; so good that I ate them all, even though I thought they'd do for two meals. I bought ten cans of sliced white potatoes, because they were ten cans for five dollars. These fry up very well, blot them dry and fry them in butter; I can always carry up a few vegetables to roast, a parsnip, some young turnips, a sweet potato; drizzle them with a little oil and a good balsamic, a twist of black pepper. I salivate at the very idea. Once the wood is in, I'd rather be left alone; I have an enormous backlog of things that need to be thought about. Oak Galls, And A Way Toward The Future; The Algorithm Of Faith; Whatever The Fuck You Believed. I'd rather just be left alone.