Friday, February 19, 2016

Midwinter Update

Good afternoon from the East Coast of the USA.  Pretty quiet here, it seems.  Not much feedback all around, so let's see if we can't change that.

Work hasn't progressed much after I hacked some stuff I wrote years ago together with a fair amount of recent work and some stuff I wrote off the top of my head.  Got a circa 20,000-word chapter done (at the cost of a few days of very little sleep, a few days' recovery, and feeling like crap for a week), most of another one done (see above), and have begun writing down (yes, with pen and paper -- and an obsessive amount of fountain pens at that) later scenes.  Hopefully I'll have more to report soon.

Other than that I've been dealing with a slightly-dislocated hip for the last few months that finally started to go back into place with a series of "amusing" pops that tend to stop me in my tracks but are so relieving when they're done that I don't mind.  Nothing too major there, though, as it has been an entire financial quarter I've been dealing with it and mostly ignoring it.  I can't, however, say the same thing about the the weather.  That's been screwy.  Like cartoon-level screwy.  Keeping in mind those of us in the USA are still using the Imperial system of measurement (and I don't intend to start an argument over the superiority of a base-10 system versus a base-12), I want to relate a few numbers.  20 inches of snow in 5 hours -- on a day we were predicted for 1-3 inches.  -40 degrees the next night, -27 the night after that, and the intervening day got up to a balmy -7!  But that's not all, because a few days later we got rain and the temperature never got over 30 -- in other words, freezing rain.  Half an inch on top of two feet of snow.  Hilarity abounds.

Currently I have no water because my pipes -- which survived the -40 without freezing other than the showers and toilets -- couldn't take a surprise -9 a couple nights ago.  It was working at 3:30AM, but by 8AM and a good 20 degrees increase in temperature, it had frozen everywhere.  I have hopes for a thaw tomorrow because it's been ~40 degrees today, only supposed to go down to 30 tonight, and be at least 40 tomorrow while it rains.  Dealing with all of this has a pretty solid impact on productivity for the obvious reasons.  For those of you in milder climates, let me tell you that melting snow and icicles to get water to give my animals and to use for cooking takes forever, especially when you have to boil it.  I could go to a local artesian well to get a few gallons of water all at once, but all my gallon jugs are pretty leaky by now and my "big blue jug" for camping is missing parts after years of hard use during situations like this and leaks like mad.  Really need to replace it, but can't really afford it right now, what with having to buy other things like food.  Luckily I still have electricity, but I've been doing a lot of my cooking (and all of my ice-melting) on a pressurized kerosene stove.  It's a lot faster than the 1500-watt induction burner/hob I've been using (my range died years ago and I don't have the $10,000 I need to rewire this place so I can replace it, and the cost to put in 1propane/lpg seemed excessive when the plan's been to replace this whole building for a few years now), and I like that I can use all of my old pots and pans on it, unlike the induction burner/hob.  It also doesn't trip any of my breakers if I forget to turn off one of my electric room heaters.

Anyway, just wanted to give you an update.  I am still working, I am surviving, and I'm in pretty good health at the moment.  Let's hope all of the above continue for the foreseeable future!  Thanks for reading and, as always, looking forward to hearing from you!

2 comments:

  1. Thanks!

    This is very unusual weather. Normally the cold comes at the end of January, not in the middle of February, and our December was insanely warm. On top of everything else, we wound up getting several hours of intense rain that resulted in low-level flooding and a half inch of ice on everything before it finally melted overnight.

    Insane.

    I can think of a few things I'd rather be doing than dealing with the weather at the moment.

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