Progress

Almost giddy. Rodney finished the floor. I can already feel a difference in the way the house holds heat. Went to Kroger and replenished supplies. Talked with Jesse in the liquor store about attaching rafters (for an addition) onto a house-trailer. After a nap I was up most of the night reconstructing a paragraph I lost in yesterday's power outage. Another one today. Made some calls, to try and find out what was going on. My rural electric cooperative buys power from a middle-man, AEP, and they're upgrading some automatic relays. I'm familiar with the rafter-to-trailer connection, because when I lived in a trailer in Utah I was asked to add a deck roof, then several more around the trailer park, and got good at it quickly. Another treatise I could write: Rafter Attachment. I'm going to finish cleaning around and behind the stove tomorrow, and slightly reorganize the fire-starting stations. I've saved all of my butter wrappers and all of my cash register receipts for the last year, to see how far that could get me starting fires. The New Yorker, the London Review Of Books, you couldn't start a fire with them if your life depended on it. I'm often reduced to stealing newspaper at the recycling center. I usually read newspapers that are weeks or even years old, just before I crumple them and start a fire. Sometimes I pull out a page, for rereading later. Back on subject, I've filled my kindling bucket with receipts and wrappers and I need another Dollar Store waste basket for kindling and need to figure out where to keep the new container. Great kindling this year as I found a fat-pine stump. You can't not start a fire with fat-pine, and an old oak table top. In truth I never thought I'd get the floor insulated as well as it is right now. Celebrate with hot cornbread and beans with kale and sausage. Sunday I need to split some wood, the last of last year's stash, and rick it up in the house. I have the sense that I'm forgetting something, but for the life of me I can't imagine what it is; I'm backed-up on all the staples. I need to book a room at the Super Eight, so I can shower, then bathe, then shower again, and watch a movie on cable, with take-out Melina pizza (the feta/olive) and a wee dram. Scrub my back with a rough sponge and rub lotion into my feet. I usually just end up watching the weather channel. On the other hand, since I have a good supply of wash water, I could buy a great zinfandel and bathe in the sheep-watering trough. Almost freezing when I get up in the night and go outside to pee. Inky dark, thick air, the smell of something dead. I came back inside and turned on the light at my desk, got a drink and rolled a smoke. A little introspection is a good thing. Why am I here, why did I end up here, what am I doing, have I done more good than harm. I'm careful about doing no harm. I don't know where that comes from. I suspect it came from reading poetry, Robert Frost and choral readings, there wasn't any music in my family, and only a few books. We moved around so much I never had serious friends so I read books. Teachers were always giving me books to read over the summer. We'd move to a new place and the first thing I'd do is draw a map that showed where our house was in relation to the library.