Nov 28,2012 Sleep & Rime



A line of rime
(not the poetic kind)





Rime on my Jeep's antenna
















Despite the sun on Monday, it never warmed up to more than the mid-twenties.  Was an inside morning for chores: dishes, laundry, cleaning, running well water; and a lazy afternoon.

JB has been working on quite an extensive computer project for the past couple of months.  Now that the Chelan County Assessor knows we are living Up Here, we want to designate 38 of our 40 acres as timber, which will greatly reduce our property taxes.  Elsie gave him copies of their report and he is adapting it to our land.  We could pay $300 or more for the county to do it or trudge through it ourselves.  Amazing the paperwork it involves.  You must own enough land to put a minimum of 20 acres into timber and have a least one acre in addition to that for your home if you are living there.  Basically it means that you plan to manage that timber acreage to keep it healthy and will not build anything on it.  We have to have it filed by 12/31 along with a fee of $250, but that fee will be more than covered by the amount we save in taxes.

Watched Midnight in Paris and thoroughly enjoyed it.  Four books down and 24 to go in The Cat Who. . . series.  So light and fun to read.

With all the walls done in the great room, we don't have to set the alarm on exceptionally cold nights to get up and tend to the wood stove.  It is still in the low 60's at 5:30 am.  However, I will need to replace all the seals in the stove next summer.  And my bladder did wake me up at 5:30 am on Tuesday.  The stove was dark, so I put in a new fire.  I snuggled back into bed and almost immediately the dogs wanted out.  Great timing, guys!  Something  was out there and Jesse spent the next 1-1/2 hours barking along the south ridge.  Dinga always comes back in fairly quickly, but if Jesse is barking, he will not come when called.  I laid down on the couch to await his arrival, knowing that he would scratch on the door to announce himself.

I am definitely going to have to start using the small, hand-held recorder that JB gave me a couple years ago.  Ideas flit through my mind like fireflies and many of them blink out before I can get them down on paper.

A thick fog crept in during Monday night and everything was white with rime, as if a light snow had fallen everywhere but the ground.  It was a cold 16 degrees when I left for Down There, and not much warmer when I arrived.  Ran errands, picked up the mail (we hit the jackpot what with catalogs and packages) and grocery shopped.  Stopped in at Larry and Elsie's to pick up a Christmas gift that Santa Elsie helped me with.  Let the dogs out and gave them treats.  And stayed to pet and converse with my four-legged friends.  When I finally got home, unpacked and put most of the groceries away, I just collapsed on the couch while JB cooked dinner.  Almost like Christmas to open the four packaged we received.  One was a gift for someone on our list.  One was 40 books of sudoku I had ordered from Dell for only $16!  Another was from JB's Mom with lots of books and goodies.  And the other was from JB's youngest brother, full of gluten-free food.  How nice!

It is overcast and cold this morning.  Still white with rime as yesterday's high was only 20 and the rime didn't have a chance to melt.

Thought for the day:  The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help. Ronald Reagan