Moth in daylight

snowy_cottage

That’s “my” new home, and that white pretty fluff between me and it is snow. It is very cold and has an unhealthy interest in feet even if they are inside shoes.

I could not come here yesterday, as my intestines were running wild. I did not even get to the city. Today I felt a lot better, so off I went to see the Mothhouse in daylight for the first time since I signed the lease. (I saw it briefly the first time I was here, before it was yet decided who would rent it. It hasn’t changed much, except everything is covered by snow.)

Despite the cold during the holidays, the bathroom faucet was working this time. I did turn up the heat in the bathroom a notch before I left for the long weekend, but it is not like it has ever been below freezing there. It is still a mystery, but my theory is that the pipes go through the floor and the floor was being cooled from below faster than it was heated from above. Anyway, it is presumably fixed now. Although the weather forecast says even colder tomorrow and New Year’s Eve, dipping below -10C (=+14F) . They also predict that it stays below freezing for all of the next week, although I have little faith in the human ability to predict a chaotic system that far in advance. The next couple days however are often reasonably close, and any deviation is usually that a change comes either a bit sooner or a bit later than predicted.

Anyway, since the snow is likely to stay for a while, I shoveled a path to the neighbor’s road from the front door. This took its sweet time, since this is not a kind of work I am familiar with anymore. (I did some vaguely related work back on the farm, but that is about 35 years ago. Muscle memory may remain, muscle size does not. Not that there was much to begin with.) At least I am not fat, so I did not have a lot of extra weight to throw around while working. Another positive thing is that the house came with an aluminum spade. It is probably not the first winter it snows here…

While I am praising things, the modern flexible drinking straws are a great help in keeping the house warm. How so? I use a modest quantity of scrunched paper or pieces of carton to get a fire started. When embers have formed under the wood, I blow through the drinking straw, causing the embers to burn at a frantic speed and white hot, which ignites the wood. Then I let it the wood burn to embers, put on more wood and repeat the quick start. Handy little invention. Even so, without a constant roaring fire the wood stove is hard pressed to heat living room and kitchen all on its own, during a cold snap such as this. (Well, I expect it to be a snap. If the climate returns to how I remember it from my childhood, it could stay like this till around the beginning of May. Although the sun would start warming in mid March sometime.)

I think it is too early yet to say who I will be in this house. I have mentioned for sure that I change a bit when I move. Some of the changes seem to be temporary (when I has moved last time, I woke up earlier and my sex drive was stronger, but this passed after a while) but some not: After I moved last time, I have not bought any manga and have even given away most of what I had, including my once favorite series about an angel and a demon that move in next door to a young boy. Uhm, I guess it wasn’t all that great a loss, but I loved my manga until I moved from the Chaos Node and it suddenly just stopped.

Right now I notice that while I am here, I prefer my musky cologne, while back in Nodeland I prefer a lighter, sandalwood-based smell. But there will surely be various subtle changes if I live to move in here. More about that if it happens, I guess. The bus is now.

Continued At Home: Previous statement was painfully exact. I suddenly realized that the bus was coming, and just hurried to save the journal and start the shutdown of the computer while I changed thick socks for shoes and threw on my outerwear before jogging to the bus. I reached it, and in fact there was enough time that it was not yet visible down the road when I reached the bus stop. So I would have had time to unplug the Googlephone and put it in my pocket, if I had the presence of mind. Unfortunately I did not, so it is now in the Mothhouse and I am not.

This is not a big deal since I don’t get phone calls every week, although we do use text messages to inform of sudden sick leaves and technical problems at work. (Beyond the usual problems, I mean, the ones we are employed to help with.) Worse, how am I going to find the Mothhouse in the dark without GPS and Google Maps? It is not like Møll is famous for its noctiluminous landmarks.