Smoking Meat

I'd packed the jowls in kosher salt, a nice day, so I started a small fire in the grill and added split green apple branches. Smoked par-boiled parsnips, Spanish sardines, and the jowls.The jowls I wrapped in canvas cornmeal sacks and put in the back of the fridge, but I ate all of the parsnips and sardines, smeared on toast. The bob-cat comes out, a couple of times a week, and sorts through the compost pile. From the compact shape I'd say it's a female. She seems to live between the house and the driveway, someplace on that slope. It's quite the sanctuary, and I don't let anyone in there. I do walk up the power easement, now and again, harvesting ginseng berries for replanting. The girls threw away the thigh pillow, I used for supporting Thoreau leaning against my desk, they thought it was disgusting, so I made another one, an old army blanket stitched into a doubled-over pillow case. It'll be disgusting in a few years too. Warm enough to wash my hair tomorrow, no fire all day, probably a record for 2/11, and I went outside in just a shirt. I don't know enough about ferns, how they keep from freezing, but a few of them were poking through the remnant snow, and the green was a welcome relief. Read another piece about wild fennel pollen. I think it's over-rated. I did a rather nice pork tenderloin, but I don't think a spice should cost more than the meat. I feel stupid enough buying saffron for risotto. Before dawn the wind wakes me, this is supposed to be a large weather system, but sounds like I'll mostly get rain. The Army Corp must be sweating bullets. Thinking about the indestructible house, drainage would be an issue. Drainage is always an issue. Still, if you controlled the high ground and everything pitched away. Kim thinks cement blocks, with lots of rebar, the cores pumped solid with concrete, would last a long time. Concrete has gotten expensive, but it's a great building material. Just look at all those viaducts. A cave might be perfect, an abandoned subway station, a tree-tip pit you covered with a tarp and heated with an oil lamp. When the wind picks up like this, you want to be under ground. Even a few inches of dirt protected mammals, everyone else was fried, during that last asteroid disaster. I'd decided to go for a small walk, but random branches were snapping off the trees and I retreated to the house. A steady wind makes a moaning in the trees, now and then sounding like a large jet at take-off. Little jets, private jets, have a whine about them, it's annoying.