It looks like we dodged a big bullet!

…or maybe I shouldn’t say that too loud. Looks like just about everybody else got nailed by this big storm, but so far all we’ve had is a dusting of snow, and now the clouds look like they may want to break up.

I’m beginning to think I’ve crossed some sort of threshold with the cabin, too, and may finally have winter licked. It’s always seemed ironic to me: I’m from Michigan, and not a stranger to winter. But all the time I lived there it was rarely more than a bother. I had access to professionally built houses with acres of good insulation and central heating. Winters here in the southwest high desert are a lot milder than anything I grew up with, and they’ve always been a real trial. Sometimes they’ve been positively scary. That travel trailer was not made for winter, and especially not after the furnace died.

But it looks like I’ve finally got the cabin to the point where comfortably sitting and watching the snow through the window, as opposed to shivering in a parka, isn’t such an impossible dream. The cabin is holding heat better with the floor insulation and skirting, the new grate has given the woodstove just that extra bit of performance that high sixties/low seventies are quite doable even when the outside weather is horrible, and I’m mostly over the paranoia about chimney fires that caused me so much trouble last winter. Once I get the cabin sided, which absolutely must happen next spring or I’ll start losing the sheathing, I think it’s gonna really be snug.

Still, I think I’ll always prefer summer. This morning after the overcast finally filled the sky and it started to snow, I got into one of my Leonard Cohen moods…

That’s got to be one of the most melancholy songs ever written, and I really don’t want it in my head. But I do get a kick out of the whole Leonard Cohen “thing.” There are a few singers and songwriters, mostly dead ones*, like Warren Zevon and Gram Parsons and Cohen, who I never heard of while they were active. Then once I did get interested enough to look up what they’d done, I wondered what was supposed to be so great about them. Cohen wrote a couple of beautiful songs, but mostly he just seemed to me to have been a real self-absorbed prick when he was young, or at least that’s the way the songs make him sound. And that’s my job. 🙂

That’s not apropos of anything in particular, but it’s been in my head all morning.

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*Yes I know Leonard Cohen is still alive. The sentence is badly written.