7 November 2010 Cold Rain and Snow

The damp, bone-chilling grayness that was yesterday has moved eastward to dampen the spirits of flatlanders. We woke up to blue skies and ground covered by the first hard frost of the season. The temperature is nearly 50°F. I took advantage of the dry weather to bring some firewood from its protected storage onto the back deck. I was also able to find some kindling-sized wood dry enough to snap and broke that into lengths that the stove will ingest easily.

The stove is cleaned out and I’ve done a test burn using newspaper that went well. I’ll lay a fire this afternoon and light it tonight. Temperatures below freezing leave the office in need of heating. The previous owner built the two added rooms, foyer and office in our usage, without bringing heating or cooling capability into them. The foyer is screened from the kitchen using insulated drapes to reduce air circulation. The office has the stove and we cool it with fans during the warmer weather. We have a load of seasoned wood on site and have contracted for another. We saved about half a load that needs to be split from the Bradford pear. It’s not very desirable firewood but it will provide some heat. We’re hoping that those stacks will carry us through the winter and spring. There is some downed wood that I can cut on the property; but getting it back to the house will be extremely difficult as there is no way to get a wagon or cart to it.

We managed to sleep in about an hour this morning before Loki woke us up. Every hour counts!

Currently I’m looking at classes for next semester. There are no history courses in the catalog that really interest me as this semester’s course has. There are some that might be interesting but they are night classes and that can get dicey in the winter. I don’t like missing classes but also don’t want to overnight in the Pathfinder if the roads are bad. We thought, when we bought the Pathfinder that we’d never need 4WD on it. Little did we know that we’d wind up in the TN mountains near the end of the road.

There’s a course in physical geology that looks interesting if I can manage to schedule labs and lectures on the same days. I don’t want to drive into town every day for classes that are supposed to be fun and interesting more than costly. Also possible, courses on volcano logy and plate tectonics that sound interesting but may require more mathematics than I can recall. The decision needs to be made this week so that I can start finagling myself into class sections that may be filled already.

Some sort of curried shrimp or seafood with linguine will grace our plates this evening.