Check List

All good. Laundromat was empty, chatted with Richard about floor-finishes. Library, stopped at the museum and talked with TR and Emily, poked my nose in at the pub to re-hydrate, stopped at the ATM. Picked up a few things at Kroger, back-up whiskey, cigaret papers, tomato soup, a steak, and some new mousetraps. The only other thing I have to do is bring in the buckets of wash water, twenty-five gallons, which is, by my standards, a lot of water. I have five gallons of drinking water, and I've already cut my tee-shirt filters that will line my new sieve (that I got at Goodwill for fifty cents) turning winter snow and sleet into drinking water. I stopped by the beer and wine store, to get some sulfite, and bought a four-pack of very good beer. I'd ordered the appetizer of fried calamari, to go, from Melina's, and gone below the flood wall. I love watching traffic on the river. I've made my preparations. I'm sure I've forgotten something, I always forget something. I need to split wood for an hour or two tomorrow, kindling and starter sticks, and I can do it while the house is heating up in the morning. The usual heretic, I'm not sentimental. Scalloped potatoes and a piece of fish for dinner. The fish was good, flounder, cooked in butter with slices of preserved lemon (Big Lots is close to the laundromat, and during the wash cycle I'd found a jar of lemons for cheap) but the potatoes were great. Nothing special, fall grown baby Yukon Golds, layered with onions, cooked in chicken broth. A lot of fresh-ground black pepper. Feeling a little too good, actually, I have to remind myself not to kick up my heels. In my simplistic view, the fact that I have water, wood, and whiskey bodes well. Joel thinks I should move further south, that the winters are going to kill me, and he's probably right, but I enjoy (that's not the correct word) or at least am fully engaged with getting home, building a fire, cooking potatoes. I have an old chair I pull up close to the stove, it has arms and an angle of repose, stare into the middle distance, stick trees and muddled foregrounds. Late Turner. The sky. If all of this was destroyed in an instant, where would you be? I have a tree-tip-pit to which I can retreat. Fuck the cares of the world.