Blow, blow thou winter wind

And "freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky". As You Like it, Act III, sc ii.. Yes, another weather post. It has been creakingly cold.

I’m not part of the commuting traffic, or finding a seat on the train, or walking with crowds of people in the city, or with other people heading on foot for their own homes. When you live in the country, and people do not populate your life and your surroundings, the weather assumes a larger presence.

First we had a serious thaw: icicles dripped and grew; I took the big bag full of Christmas tree branches off the porch, and spread the boughs on the garden to be covered by the next snow. They'll do some good in March protecting tender shoots when the ground begins to thaw during the day and freeze again at night. There’s still snow on the ground, but you can see bare ground in abundance.

But the weather guys warned about an Arctic front moving in. On Wednesday the trees were filled with frost (and the camera was at home). On Thursday the front moved in for real.

Ye gods, what wind. When I walked out of work, the wind blew my big fur coat hood, that I’d tied securely, off my head. I drove home in near-whiteout conditions. It was a long, slow trip, and almost no one was on the road, thank heaven. The 8pm weather reported winds of 40 mph and wind chills of minus 30. I believe it. When I got out of the car at home I stepped on ice and the wind almost blew me over. In walking 8 feet from car to house I got cold. It was seriously windy all night. Friday morning the car told me that the temperature was -10. Saturday at 7 am it was -5, and this morning it was -3, with a high of (ta daa) 24!!

This weather makes me wonder how country people survived these and worse temperatures in winter many years ago. During the harsh 1777 winter at Valley Forge conditions are reported to have been snowy with high temperatures in the 20s. Normal lows would have been in the teens. The Eye on the Sky weather journal often includes Vermont and NH winter reports from the 1800s, with occasional lows around -50, and that's not in the mountains!

How on earth did people stay warm without oil or propane furnaces? How many people would have died from exposure in Thursday’s wind? They had fireplaces, and if they were lucky they had woodstoves. Keeping the fire going was essential. Clothing, however, was not anywhere near as warm as what we have today. Indoor plumbing and ready hot water were non-existent, and men and women had outdoor work to do year round. I suspect that freezing was not an unusual cause of death.

Money talks

This is the column headline in the New York Times, the Valley News, and I'm sure many newpapers and blogs across the nation. I think that all Americans, even those of us who are not political junkies, knew that there would be changes in the law of the land when Bush’s appointees Samuel Alito and John Roberts ascended to the Supreme Court bench.

But the idea of oveturning legal precedents that reach back over a hundred years, and giving corporations many of the same Bill-of-Rights rights as citizens is beyond astonishing. The long history of legislation and lawsuits concerning corporate money funneled to political campaigns stems from repeated evidence showing that such money bought elections.

I attended Northwestern University from 1961-1965. Chicago politics was run by Richard J. Daley’s Democratic party machine, funded largely by Chicago businesses and some multi-national corporations and Big Business leaders across the land. “Vote early and often” was an accepted fact in Chicago elections.

In 1965, at my first job with AT&T, I was covered by a union contract, and in local and federal election years money was always deducted from our paychecks to contribute to the candidate that the union backed, whether individuals (me, for instance) backed that candidate or not. After some bad press of some sort, the union membership was finally able to put a stop to this practice. Still, it was not until sometime in the 1970s that most state legislatures passed laws against automatically taking campaign “donations” out of the paychecks of state and local government employees, to support the party in power.

The difference between the politics of those days and today is the Internet. Information flows freely and quickly, and I can only hope that bloggers and news reporters (the few that remain) will keep tabs on the rivers of money that flow and will flow from corporations and lobbyists to state capitals and Washington. There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that any state legislature, or Congress, will pass any more laws that really require thorough financial reporting – the laws on the books now are evaded or ignored. In fact, we should be concerned that the Supreme Court ruling will render many state campaign-finance laws invalid.

President Obama has learned the hard way that national politics requires presidential involvement, direction and leadership. But the Democratic party has been equally ignorant: see how full the news was of Massachusetts going Republican "after electing Democrats for 40 years." Hey, stupid Dem party officials, Massachusetts elected Ted Kennedy time after time, not just some Democrat. Massachusetts found it had a senator who was effective. As time went on, Kennedy's party affiliation meant little. People weren’t voting for Democrats. They were voting for Teddy.

There has been so much Congressional wrangling, name-calling and unsavory deal-making over the health care business that the public has turned against the Obama administration. Those of us who hoped for a President who could influence Congressional leaders or legislation have suffered crushing disappointment. The public has watched its government unable to stem horrific job losses; allow bank bailouts to be followed by big bonuses; and totally fail to make meaningful changes in health care costs and delivery. Many people of various political persuasions and I are shaking our heads. We see the US government as inept, disconnected from the public it serves, or close to corrupt.

Now uncontrolled money will be thrown into the mix. We should be even more concerned that only the wealthy and well-connected will be able or willing to run for office. The public confidence and trust in government that is so low today will drop even lower when money begins to influence election outcomes even more.

Oh happy (birth)day

Not that I make a big deal of my birthday. But it was a terrific day, thanks to some surprises.

Surprise #1: I got to work early and was working diligently when I heard whispering outside my office and there were three of my dear friends and colleagues with a birthday cake, a real work of art: chocolate sponge layers with chocolate cream filling, topped with chocolate whipped cream and FRUIT! Blueberries and strawberries on top, with kiwi, dark cherries and black raspberries hidden in the center.

Then my boss, our newest team member, and my next-door office neighbor appeared. Seven people in my office is quite a crowd. I don't often get teary-eyed at 9am, but the thoughtfulness and caring of these folks, 3 of whom have worked for me, was sweet, touching, and unexpected.

Try as we might, we could not cut the cake into the usual skinny slices, because the slices fell apart. When cakes and other baked goods appear, the remainders usually are put by the coffee. But with 7 not-skinny slices gone, the cake didn't go very far. I made sure our long-time admin got a piece, because she's a quiet, shy person who works hard and gets no credit. Boy, was that delicious cake. Cake for breakfast! Yum!

Surprise #2: After the birthday party I returned to my computer and I discovered it had been attacked by some malware that put pornographic web pages up over and over. This is a surprise at 9:30am. I called our Help Desk, and they told me to shut down the computer and bring it to them.

Surprise #3: How long would the Help Desk have it? The rest of the day. Well. I really wouldn't be able to get any work done at all. There were no loaner laptops available. I went to my boss. "There's no point in you staying," she said. "Happy birthday."

I'd planned to leave for Burlington at half past noon to get my hair done. Instead, I left at 11 am!! I got all my errands done before my hair appointment, and got to make fun stops afterward - at a yarn shop, Lake Champlain Chocolates, Cabot Cheese and Green Mountain Camera. I got home at 4pm, not 6pm, to find birthday greetings from family and a birthday box from my sister.

Birthday bonus: The Help Desk has my laptop. That means I'm absolutely unable to do any work at the office this weekend. Oh happy day!!

January thaw

I've been straight out at work since school resumed. Sigh.

In Vermont during winter, a post would be incomplete without something about the weather. When school resumed on Jan 4, an artic blast came in and we had temperatures hovering at and below zero and wind chills that kept people and animals indoors. Then on the 14th temperatures moved into the 20s. On the 15th, into the 30s. On the 16th, the high was (ta-daa) 40 degrees. Glory be. I got the stovewood in without a warm parka. And it was a bright sunshiny day.

The high point of Saturday (the aforementioned 16th) was a workshop I attended to learn about my digital camera. The teacher was Bryan Pfeiffer from Plainfield, VT, Vermont's best-known bird-watcher who makes his living leading birding tours and hosting a weekly TV and radio show called "For the Birds". (See http://www.wingsphotography.com/about.html) Being a birder, he takes photos, and among birders photography is a highly competitive side sport. Taking a clear photo of a small creature that moves very quickly and almost never stays still is a huge challenge. Bryan ups the ante by searching for and photographing dragonflies (he is a recognized expert) and butterflies. He is a volunteer fireman, too.

So last Saturday, when he announced a one-day workshop on digital cameras, at a very inexpensive price, I signed up. I had often reviewed the Canon manual and found photography to be a foreign language. It was a great day. We learned what the important settings were, how to find them, how to set them, what they could do for us. We took pictures. We fried our brains, actually.

Bryan is a great, enthusiastic teacher who really pays attention to what the students are and aren't understanding. This with 19 students with different interests and abilities, and 9 different brands of cameras ranging from a 10-year old Canon and a 9-year-old Nikon to a very fancy digital SLR with a monster zoom lens. Six of us had Canon point-and-shoots, and not one of those Canons had the same features!

I still have many, many questions. Because I've spent all my years using the automatic settings and "fooling the camera" I have many habits to unlearn. Now to practice. For instance, here are two pictures: in one, the background is fine but the gravestone is underexposed; in the other,the gravestone looks great but the background is overexposed. Proper exposure of the whole photo, and not just what I'm focusing on, is my major issue.

The drive to Plainfield (45 minutes each way) and spending from 8am to 2pm in a firehouse dining room were all well worth it.

Today was not sunny, and not as warm, and I spent all afternoon at work. But at 10 am it was 36 degrees - warm enough to take the car to the car wash!! Underneath the mud and road dirt is still a car! The cold returns tomorrow.

Sleepy warmth*

My woodstove is lovely. It’s in steady use from November through March. After 30 minutes of communing with and cajoling the fire-building gods the main house becomes comfortable, and in about an hour the chill will be out of the bedroom but it will still be cool for sleeping.

Lately, we’ve been dealing with snow. Not anything unusual, just one of the winter events. Nonetheless, I’ve become cranky about it. The wind is blowing, and that is causing me fits, because the wind has been filling my woodpile with snow.

Stovewood is delivered to my driveway in May or June as two piles of 16” long pieces, dumped from the truck.    The stovewood must be stacked into tall, rectangular structures using these oddly-shaped building blocks. Some are half-cuts, some are quarter cuts, some are rectangular center cuts (many of which are wider at one end than at the other), some are twisted and have no definable shape. Stacking the stovewood is an all-summer effort for me and many other Vermonters. To some it's an art but that's another story.

I stack the stovewood in back of the house. About half of the wood is stacked further out in the yard, covered with a blue tarp. I use “yard” stovewood until it snows, after which the snowy tarp is too hard to remove (to get the wood) and replace (to cover it up again). Then I begin to take wood from the stack under the roof extension.

(This picture was taken in Feb 2008, when it was snowing every week and there was about 3 feet of snow on the ground). You can see the roof extension, and under half of it is where I stack as much wood as will fit (usually about 1 ½ cords). A serious winter wind causes the snow to drift around behind the house. So I hang two tarps along the edge of the roof extension. When they’re properly secured, they keep almost all the blowing snow off the wood under the roof, keeping the wood basically dry. This is my most important woodstack when there's snow on the ground.

A stack is stabilized by criss-crossing the pieces at each end of the stack. I didn’t finish the woodstacking under the roof until late September and was in a hurry. I noticed that the end closest to the driveway didn’t have level criss-crosses. They were leaning outward a little. But the pieces on top of them seemed pretty solid, so I forged ahead.

About a week later I heard an ominous rumbling and finally looked outside. Sure enough, that end of the woodpile had tumbled down into the garden. It wasn’t a huge disaster, about 20 pieces down and the rest very secure. But the tarp on the driveway end had been ripped down.

I threw another piece of tarp over the end of the woodpile and secured it enough so it wouldn’t blow away. Then the weather turned to rain, work got busy, and I had no time to rehang the tarp. So when it snowed right before Christmas, snow blew into the wood under the roof. And when it started snowing for real while I was away, more snow blew in. On New Year’s Eve Day, with a lot of snow already coming down, I took a ladder outside and rehung the tarp. It’s not great, and there’s still a lot of snow in the woodpile but it’s better than it was.

There is a set of “Rules for being human” (easily googled) which include the following:
YOU WILL LEARN LESSONS and A LESSON IS REPEATED UNTIL LEARNED. A lesson that I have not learned thoroughly is that when there is a problem with the wood-stacking, the offending wood must must be unstacked and restacked. As a result, I’m going to be dealing with damp stovewood for the rest of the winter. (Whine.)

*For a nice poem about the woodstove, see http://avoidmuse.blogspot.com/2008/07/woodstove.html