More Cold

Not too bad outside but the wind is supposed to come up again, so I take advantage of the calm to go look for tracks in the settled snow. Except for listening to the weather on the radio I prefer the quiet, the news is depressing. I do listen to Science Friday because it's almost always interesting. After the tracks excursion (one fox kill, one disappeared rabbit, a family of grouse) I carry in three armloads of wood, with a break between each, for tea and a reading session. Split some kindling, melt snow, make the rice dish, which is just a fried rice with cracklings, a totally unspectacular but filling dish. Use my time, the daylight hours, to double check what I need to get through the night. You have to hand it to those pioneers, life was brutal. A sod hut with a make-shift stove burning buffalo shit. Basho:

no moon, no blossoms,
just drinking sake
all alone

When I was outside I noticed that where there had been bare ground (no leaf cover) before the last snow, there was an odd surface ice formation. Miniature pingos. The bare ground held a little heat, sublimated off some snow and even surface moisture, but then it all froze rock hard. It's not quite like walking on a field of ice picks. My schedule now is based completely on feeding the fire, took an early nap so I would get up sometime after midnight, and my timing was close enough (there's quite a bit of slack in the system), caught the fire, got a drink, and rolled a smoke. Considering it's close to zero the house is amazingly comfortable. My plan is to stay up most of the night, feed the stove a couple of times, and start tomorrow, supposed to be the coldest day and night in this round, with the house as warm as I can get it. My fall-back position is to wrap up in several blankets and read Proust for 48 hours. The wind picks up, I can hear it in the stick trees, it moans like a lover, and calls like a siren. Fell asleep, but caught the fire again about five. Just in time, as the temps had dropped and it was cooling off inside the house. Went out on the back porch and it hurt to breathe. When I could damp down the stove I went back to sleep, by the time I'd gotten back up, made coffee and breakfast, it was after noon. Temps had climbed to 14 degrees, three trips to the woodshed during the course of the afternoon, and that was it, put on my bathrobe, over long underwear, jeans, and four layers up top. The stove wasn't burning hot, clogged with ashes, so I knocked the fire down, and dumped hot ashes, which is a bit tricky, but I get it done, and have a very hot fire twenty minutes later. It's supposed to warm into the twenties tomorrow. TR called from the museum, said that town was completely dead, as it should be, with extremely low wind chill. I wear a face mask when I go outside, and with my bathrobe, I must look suspicious. When the oven gets hot (over 400 degrees) I make a pone of cornbread, a thin pone, in the eight inch skillet, and I eat half of it while it's still hot. Now they're saying below zero but it doesn't make that much difference; a roaring fire, a down mummy bag. The next day you start over again, cold beans, cold tracks, general coldness. But it's not rocket science.