October 19, 2004

• Snow Again

  When
  I woke today, I could hear drips coming off the roof.  I asked
  Doug if it was snowing or raining.  He said when he was out there
  it had been snow, but it could have turned to rain.  When I got
  up, I opened the door and stuck out an arm.  It was rain mixed
  with snow.  The temp on my newly-installed indoor-outdoor
  thermometer was 33.3°F.  What I can now see out my window, a
  couple of hours later, is a thick, windless, vertical fall of big wet
  flakes.  It comes down that way for a while, then switches to a
  more watery precip.  In the time it took to write that, it made
  that switch again.

  At least now the leaves are off the trees.  The first two
  snowfalls this year came early while there were still some green leaves
  on.  That snow melted and we had a brief Indian summer that has
  now passed along with the leaves.  It gave me some time to get
  some outdoor work done, but I still have a few tasks out there that
  need to be done.

  I
  didn’t want to go out in it.  The pic through the window was too
  indistinct, so I stood in the doorway and took one pic looking straight
  out into the yard and another back along the side of the house toward
  the back yard.  That latter one is here on the right.

  When I stumbled back to the bathroom this morning first thing, I was in
  there half an hour or so.  I came back out and told Doug I can’t
  seem to go to the bathroom lately without getting hung up cleaning
  it.  This time I’d noticed the amber plastic translucent panel
  between the sink and counter area and the alcove that once shielded the
  porcelain throne.  That hunk of porcelain fell victim to a
  freeze-up-and-burst phenomenon during the tenure of an earlier set of
  housesitters here, and Mark never got around to replacing it.  Not
  a big priority, since he’d not gotten the septic tank dug,
  either.  I can’t help wondering why the thing was full of water in
  the first place, since this trailer was never connected to a septic
  system since it’s been here.  I filled that alcove with a steel
  shelf unit where I store tools, ammo, spare computer parts, camping
  gear, etc.

  Anyhow,
  since I’d already cleaned just about everything else in there, I
  decided to clean the translucent panel.  That was when I
  discovered that it wasn’t amber at all.  It had just accumulated
  an amber-looking layer of grunge.  The panel is
  clear-translucent.  Wow!  Cleaning it was challenging and
  time consuming because one side is textured with a diagonal
  channel-and-bump pattern.  I did a lot of wiping back and forth,
  round and round, in and out of those channels until my virgoan
  persnicketiness was fully satisfied.  Then I wandered back out
  here and got a laugh out of Doug with my “hung up” statement.

  He also laughed when I told him the corn flakes on the kitchen floor
  were making it slippery.  Go figure.  I guess some geniuses
  are just easily amused.  I indicated that I thought he should
  sweep up his corn flake spill before he started washing dishes, and he
  has now done that.  It’s probably a good thing I didn’t point out
  that wet corn flakes wouldn’t be as slippery.  He just now
  commented that it was counterintuitive that corn flakes would make the
  floor slippery, but, “I suppose it’s the same principle as lubricating
  with graphite.”  That reminded me again of my freight train ride
  in 1971.  I’m percolating a blog about hobo signs and monikers, so
  that trip has been in the forefront of my mind a lot lately.  I’ll
  explain the graphite connection then, I suppose. 
  

  • 2:32 pm
  • 4 Comments