The cure for too much holiday party

Sooner or later on a holiday, you have to get out of the house.

Everybody, including the cats, is turkey up to HERE.

Crazy Weather

On January 3, the junction of Highway 101 and 113, near Forks, looked like this:


















Our gold roses were still blooming when the storms hit. I headed the blossoms and left them on the snow:



















On January 18, there was barefootin' at the Clallam Bay beach (Clayton Bannon and Damen Ringgold). That's Canada there in the background, with snow.

It be snowin' its ASS off

The Yukon gave us a Solstice present – its weather!

This is our front yard, with snow drifted up so high we go out the back door. We're using the snow from the front porch to melt until we can get a look at the pipes. Pretty nice, the wind bringing us our water. We of course filter and boil anything that's going to get near our mouths. We normally flush the toilets with bath water, so we have lots of buckets.

The snow falling now is soft and fluffy. The first storm is what I'm calling igloo snow. Franz Boas said the four Inuit words for snow were kind of like other languages: falling snow, snow on the ground, snowdrift, stuff like that. Igloo snow was the kind you could cut with a mattock to make snow blocks for an igloo; dense, icy crystals that packed together to form a firm substance. The new stuff is snowball snow!

Confusion: as I was typing, at the back of my mind I was wondering how Dan could have fallen asleep so quickly, because I heard a man deeply – and loudly -- snoring on the floor beside the couch. Then Dan walked in and my mind focused. It wasn't Dan on the floor.

We used to have an old native guy in a plaid shirt show up at the first lighting of the wood stove in the autumn. He was there for a second, nodded once and disappeared. We haven't seen him in a while, so maybe he feels at home enough now to sleep in front of the stove.

Dan says, “He's welcome! Enjoy!”

(We've had a lot of experience with ghosts and tape recordings over the years. Lots of cats, some old ladies, some old guys, one crying girl -- and a fucking dead pedophile. I'm about to concentrate on a life's worth of comic's collections -- start the prose novels so many people have been asking for. Lord knows I have the weird life -- and dialog).

This is the stove, melting, heating and boiling water and food. Bread rising, more snow melting, beans simmering. We loves us our Quadrafire, Becky. We have about three years' worth of collected wood sitting in the yard and shed. I knew this economic mess was coming, and we weren't going to be caught short. We have lots of food, cat food, solar lights and wood. And wireless. We be happy Technohicks.

The only car to move came down to slip and slide to the house that – ahem – runs a business. Let's say that somebody needed her medicine; the kind that gives the really bad teeth. What can I say? I'm hooked on caffeine and the occasional hit of tobacco, and I love my booze. My drugs are legal, so I can't point fingers at anybody else. Especially in THIS weather.

Dogs love this. Here's Willy, the neighbor's lab, so happy somebody will walk through the snow with her, plowing through the snow on the Old Lighthouse Bridge to Slip Point. In Willy's case, it's a whole lot of running around and running back to tell you “Isn't this great???” Willy doesn't give a damn. She'll fetch sticks in deep water and heavy waves – riding the surf back to shore – until your arm gives out.

I rescued a bird. Next blog.

It be snowin'

Well, it's kinda snowing. It's not a huge blizzard like the '78 snowbowl in Ohio, but it's making the kids happy.

Bryce Hat, with Colby and Samisue Underwood, braved the first winter weather of the year to walk their spaniel Freckles at the Clallam Bay Park. Colby expressed every kid's and dog's love of snow when he said, “We need more!” Temperatures at freezing brought dry snow and blasts of wind with a storm that originally went around the west end.

I grew up near Mukilteo, Washington, and severe weather was something my mom would wake us up for: "Look! Lightning!!"

Bryce is one of the Hat Boys: a group of red-headed boys that originally included their red-headed sister and a Makah boy and a little girl who wore sweaters 'way too big for her. They would play tag and hide-and-go-seek in the rain, because you either play in the rain out here, or you don't play outside, period. Our cat, Simba, was originally their cat, and used to follow them to the beach and downtown, and get under their feet during the street football. He's unafraid of people, which speaks well for the kids.

The first year up here we had no wood and had to get in a quick load of the green stuff. It's made me a bit nuts about making sure we have plenty. This is a shot of just PART of the suppply:



The sticks are part of small aspens the Utility District let us haul off after Mike had cut 'em down to clear out the power and telephone line paths.

He didn't have to chip them and we got a lot of wood. And the song sparrow who owns our yard gets to shelter in the twigs and eat the bugs and the buds that came out even after the twigs were cut.

It's all good.