Jump Start

Rodney called, ready to work, and he does work, hard, all day. Almost finished the floor insulation, then a couple of other little things. I go ahead and pay him the $100 we'd agreed on, and he says he'll be over soon to finish the last couple of bays, because that was the deal. He wants to come over and work-up some firewood for me, as an extra reserve, cut, split, and stacked in the woodshed. I agree, as long as he doesn't drink when he's using the chainsaw. This will complete a triple play for me, getting the yard cleared, getting the floor insulated, and getting the firewood. A month ago it looked impossible and now I'm feeling more confident about another winter. A few more things for the pantry. My water supply is good, and I've set up a 16 foot 2x12 with one end on a sawhorse and the other on the ground. This makes collecting clean snow very easy for wash water mid-winter. I filter it through pieces of old tee-shirt. I get eight filters from a tee-shirt, for my crude system, which is a strainer that's secured over another five gallon bucket, lined with a filter. I use this for everything except drinking and brushing my teeth. Water does become an issue, but I stockpile juice in the fall, and I can always boil melted snow. This time of year, every time I go off the ridge, the entire landscape is changed. Leaf-fall at about 50% and you start seeing things. A forgotten graveyard, a shelf of sandstone, the scars of old logging roads. In my positive glee at seeing some problems solved, I can't forget it's a long row ahead. More rain, and all of the saturated fallen leaves are soggy. You couldn't start a fire here if they paid you. Maybe the first job was the guy that kept the fire burning, the proto-priest, a deranged dude with a crooked smile, drying wood at the edge of the fire and adding it as needed. Or the witch with smoldering embers in her bag. Sometime, a million and a half years ago (the dates are all over the board) we started using fire and flaking crude tools. Our brain got bigger and we started carrying things around. Evidently, we've been on two feet for a very long time and no one knows why. Forty to sixty thousand years ago we ate the last of our ancestors and starting painting on cave walls. Soon after that we started fishing for trout. Then there was toilet paper, Spam, and Ramen noodles. Spam really caught on in Hawaii, it's not unusual to find a Spam and American cheese omelet on the menu. I have a love hate relationship, because I loved fried Spam and American cheese sandwiches, but I know they're mot very sophisticated. Spam is half-way between head-cheese and bologna. Essentially using waste products. The power went out for a couple of hours, but I'd saved this, before I went out on the back porch for a smoke. Breaking dawn is a lovely thing.