Pileated Woodpeckers

Lunch in town with D and TR. Town is mostly shut down, for the holiday, and the library is closed. Lively conversation, everyone coming over to see D, who doesn't get down this way much anymore. I picked up a couple of things at Kroger, back-up butter and black pepper, a couple of pasta meals, but I'll have to get back to town this week for the Library and Laundromat. I keep the radio on quite a bit in the morning, listening to the weather forecast. First mention of snow and I'll run in for last minute supplies. I've paid for Rodney's help and the larder mostly in cash I'd squirreled away, so now I should actually start saving money again, which is good because car insurance and land taxes fall due the first of February. I'm amazed that I can float my economy, but it does seem to be true. I never thought I'd see the day. Eighteen months since I left the museum, and probably I'm better off in almost every way, my finances are stable, despite new shocks and a set of tires, a new gas tank, paying for yard work and firewood, buying another four-pack of underwear. I like getting up in the middle of the night, for whatever reason, and reading or writing for a couple of hours. It's nice, not having to be somewhere. It's nice to just stop what I'm doing and listen to the rain. TR's music is informed by the rain. Rolling thunder, rain on the roof, and a train in Kentucky. What is especially nice is not having to compromise my time. Any relationship requires compromise, it's the standard coin of commerce. The great thing about being a recluse is you don't have to pay much attention to all that other crap. I could have stayed in town, had another beer, but I just wanted to get back to the ridge, where I might see a bear, and the fox needs an apple. Big winds and the trees are being stripped bare. The verges on Mackletree have disappeared in mounds of leaves and vehicles are trailed by rooster tails. The Pileated Woodpeckers are everywhere. I see six of them on the way home and there are three on the ridge. Find a picture of the skeleton of one of these birds and notice how the beak is not connected directly to the skull. Good engineering. An interesting run of research all afternoon. I was finishing a book on cooperage, amazed at what a difficult trade it was and is (though mostly done by machine now, there is actually a stave mill nearby) with a usual 7 year apprenticeship. The history of the barrel, which is a truncated spheroid; easy to move around, but wastes a certain amount of space. The forklift changed everything, there was no longer a reason to waste space. So, that line of thought led me to think about something I had read, and I couldn't remember if it was Descartes or Pascal, which had led me several times half-way up the staircase where the 11th Britannica lives. Somehow got side-tracked into a long entry on Galileo. When he died one of his fingers was cut off and preserved, it's on display at the Science Museum in Florence. Maddeningly, the article doesn't say which finger. The next time you're in Florence, drop me a card. This led to a history of embalming, which is ancient, but got a big shot in the arm during the Civil War, to be able to send bodies home for burial. Of course, fortunes were made. Legally, you don't have to be embalmed in Ohio, and you don't need a casket; you can be incinerated or buried wrapped in a rug, and I make a note to add that to my will. Dress me in a bathrobe / roll me in a rug / it doesn't make any difference. In the interest of propriety, you might include a plank, to stiffen up the bundle, it's always embarrassing to drop a floppy corpse. Fairly late I realized I haven't eaten enough, so I made a butternut squash risotto. This isn't difficult, it just requires some time, and I can read while stirring. It's quite good and very filling, and there's plenty left-over for fried cakes in the morning. The wind continues to howl a gale. The trees are stick figures bending through 45 degrees of arc. The house groans a little, but it accepts the wind; it's loaded so well and so over-built, a full gale isn't much of a problem. From inside it's a kind of muffled video, outside, shit is blowing everywhere; my Weber grill wraps around an oak tree, my dumpster folding chair completely disappears, the leaves are blowing into windbreaks. I go outside and put a large rock on the metal roofing pile. One keeps metal roofing to cover things, it's a habit, like collecting five-gallon buckets. I go into this in my treatise "The Recluse And His Place In Society". The wind is howling, the ridge allows full access to this, a wind that tumbles off mountains and roars across the plains. Three things, actually, when push comes to serve: a bottle of whiskey, a pouch of tobacco, and a pork loin. I assume beans and rice as a matter of course.