October 21, 2002

• I
  started the Kodiak Island chapter of the memoirs last night, but it is
  slow going.  Other stuff has been distracting me.  My brain
  chemistry is weirder than usual, mood swings coming at me out of the
  blue.  If it wasn’t so damn familiar, it would be alarming. 
  It can’t be a crisis when it’s been going on this long.

  Doug and I did another water run yesterday.  As you can see,
  the warm weather is still in effect here, nothing frozen yet. 
  Today is the first day in weeks that it hasn’t rained.

  All the leaves are gone now, but oddly, a new crop of mushrooms and
  some fresh green shoots of things such as chickweed have come up since
  that one hard frost and the snow a few weeks ago.

  The weather has been warm enough that we’ve been okay with just the
  woodstove.  I’ve taken that as a sign it’s okay to procrastinate
  on fixing the furnace.  We now have a new element for the fuel
  filter.  Someone is going to have to install it, and that someone
  is probably me.  At the time I do that, I can check to see if the
  little kink in the copper tubing is cutting off the oil supply. 
  Later for all that.

  While we were at the spring yesterday (that’s Doug above, with a
  bucket at the waterhole), the sun broke through the clouds for the
  first time in days and days.

  In the brief sunshine, this birch tree with its curling bark and the parasitic lichen caught my eye.  I love trees.

  And now a few words about weather.  Climate, I’ve heard, is
  what you expect, and weather is what you get.   It has been a
  long time since we had a climate here.  All we get is surprises in
  the weather department.

  

  This shot I took yesterday of “our” muskeg, just across the street in front of our house, is unusual for this time of year.

  It usually looks like this, flooded, in spring.  Last spring it
  was dry as soon as the snow was gone and stayed that way all
  summer.  The cranes and wild ducks that usually nest around it
  went elsewhere this year, and we had none of the frogsong we usually
  have on spring evenings.  Now, as the waterfowl are headed
  south and the frogs are hibernating, the muskeg is flooding.  Ah,
  well….

  Greyfox’s fifty-fifth birthday earlier this month transformed him
  into an official senior citizen.  Last night he blogged about
  1947, the year of his birth.  That’s all I know about the
  blog, since I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m betting it is worth a
  read.  I’m off to ArmsMerchant now, to read it. 

  

  • 5:38 pm
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