Here comes the rain again…

Incoming weather is following the forecast exactly: Yesterday was windy and 10^o cooler than Thursday. Today is blustery and cool with light rain. Tomorrow’s supposed to be wintery and Monday it’s supposed to storm and get really cold.

That few days of frost we had almost 2 weeks ago made all the trees turn, and now the wind is stripping them bare. I noticed my barren little fruit tree had abruptly turned a few days ago…

…and this morning Neighbor D and I decided to do the Monday water run a couple of days early and all the cottonwoods have gone pale and are blowing dead leaves all over the town.

I’m comfortably sitting around in a t-shirt at the moment but that won’t last. Winter has come to the Gulch. I hate winter.

On the other hand I’m well prepared for once. A few days ago I took the opportunity of this last pleasant interlude to do the one last bit of winter prep I’d been putting off, crawling under the Lair to replace that sheet of underfloor insulation that tore loose last winter when a packrat decided to store its rock collection there. I hate crawling around under the Lair but sometimes you gotta do it. And now I shouldn’t have to worry so much about that one frozen pipe that has so often made life harder – as long as the rats leave it alone that combination of pipe wrap, batting and then a sheet of styrofoam between the joists seems to do the trick. The fact that the Lair’s interior is warmer so the floor over the pipe doesn’t get so cold probably helps as well.

Time to go into cocooning mode. The Lair has reached a point where winters are no longer the trial they used to be, it’s really not even that unpleasant anymore. But I recently scientifically calculated that the nine cold winters I spent between moving here in 2006 and finishing the cabin walls in 2015 were such a collective hassle that I shouldn’t expect to stop reacting emotionally to November until sometime around 2050. So I guess I’ll just have to be patient.