Too Comfortable

Overslept. Barely caught the fire, just a few coals left, but enough to start over again. Shake off the sleep, crawl out from under the covers and turn on a light. Below zero. It's a good chance to clean the grate, rake the coals forward. It's a procedure, I've done it so many hundreds of times that I know all the moves. Instead of just throwing a log on, I need to nurse things for an hour, until I can get a big log going. Then I can go back to sleep. I manage to get pissed off about some inaccuracies in some fiction I'm reading. You can't put 5600 pounds of gasoline in an ambulance, no one has ever sheathed a house in 4x8 oak planks, in Key West, which is a tidal node, the rise and fall are measured in inches. Don't get me started. I know it must be Sunday because I go off on a rant. I've traditionally saved my rants for Sunday. I don't fully understand why I'm so anti-clerical, but vestments have always bothered me, as Henry said, never take a job where you have to change clothes. Which leads to a tirade against dietary restrictions. Jesus, it's cold, so I rail against that. Finally get back to sleep, secure and warm in my bag; wake, a few hours later, to a pewter sky and light snow. I have a smoked jowl in reserve, so I decide to make a pot of black beans and rice, and that'll leave me cracklings for cornbread. I've hoarded my last four fresh eggs for four pones of cornbread, then moving on into the powdered egg and dried milk version. A little wind and fine driven snow looks worse than it is. It warms to twenty degrees which actually feels a bit balmy. I couldn't get far from the stove because I was rendering cracklings and caramelizing onions. I ended up cooking a pot of navy beans, instead of black beans, because I had more of them, and by the time I'd mixed everything together, brought it to a boil, and slid it over to a cooler range on the cooktop, it was after five in the afternoon, another day spent making bean soup, then turn to making cornbread. I sometimes use the same 8 inch skillet for caramelizing onions that I use for cooking cornbread and I don't wipe it out, those little bits of charred onion in the cornbread crust are great. Add a tablespoon of rendered fat to the skillet, and put it in the oven until it's smoking hot, thin the batter a bit with boiling water, so it evens out in the hot pan, and bake it for twenty minutes. Snowing hard when the bread comes out of the oven, but I have to say, a pot of beans, rice, hot bread, it's difficult to find fault. I'd better send this, the weather is looking bad.