Passing Strange

Thump in the night and I go outside with a flashlight. Something had hit the back wall of the house. A dead baby possum with an owl sitting on top. Must have been too heavy. I turn off the flashlight and go back inside, never one to disturb an owl's dinner. Got a wee dram, made a snack of goat cheese and sweet gherkins, then read Thoreau for a while. He just got back from the Maine woods. Got another load of recycling together, and various clothing items to take to the Goodwill. Need to let the back thresh-hold dry completely, before I dig into the carpenter-ant damage. I need a rooflet over the back door. I meant to get out, drive down and look at the new bridge construction, but I got into a groove of thinking about various things I needed to get done, the back porch, the thresh-hold, changing refrigerators, stocking the larder, so I pretty much sat still, the entire day, visualizing projects. Putting a small roof over the back door will be an interesting project. As a challenge, I only want to use materials I can fashion with a hatchet and a draw-knife. I need two brackets, crotches or knees, however you want to go, and a miniature roofing system (maybe the plastic coffee cans), and it wouldn't matter if the whole thing leaked a bit. Things leak, it's a fact of life. It would need to be stout, what with the ice droppage in the late winter and spring, probably a metal roof, the plastic coffee cans wouldn't last a year. I think I'll just build up the thresh-hold with a couple of layers of synthetic wood and screw a compressible gasket on top of that. The back porch is no big deal, I'll pay Rodney to screw it down. Glenn thought the dying fridge could be a storage closet, a back-up pantry, so I'm going to save it for a year and see if I use it. Put it against the NE corner of the house and it would never be in the sun, a great place to store corn-meal and grits, cured smoked hog jowls, a host of beans, wasabi; and parsnips in the late winter, when the sugars are converted. I've been eating a lot of sweet potatoes recently, with butter and black pepper. I make some chips, with parsnips and sweet potatoes, in used peanut oil, I'd already cooked flounder fillets and hush-puppies, and they're excellent, when I dip them, warm, into aioli, there's a phase change. More thunder moving in, I'd better go.