Invisible

We've got the cold. I think it hit -34 in town last night, so likely -37 or so here.

The new-to-me truck won't start, I think it both needs a new battery and the engine heater isn't working. So that's fun.

Yesterday Tucker jumped the truck and I went down to go get feed. It was snowing-- I know better than to go by the forecast rather than the observed weather and that was supposed to be the clear window-- and snow was behaving how it always behaves in deep cold. That is, it turns into a dust storm.

Solidly below -20 snow not only doesn't clump at all, it doesn't stick to surfaces. This means that with good snow tires the roads are great - they're clear, and snow tires will stick to them like summers won't. But. There is a ton of effectively weightless dust along the whole road that's tossed up by passing vehicles and, when it's snowing, by snowploughs. The dust is super reflective so a vehicle can be fifteen feet ahead of you and completely invisible, and because of the way the snow kicks up you can still see a couple feet of clear road and then just an ambiguous haze in which the car is hidden.

That is to say, it was a slow drive down and back. Folks up here don't have a great sense for putting on their lights in these conditions (lights give maybe an extra 6-8' of visibility in a cloud like this). Different folks had different strategies: if you follow a logging truck about four feet behind it, for instance, you can see its lights and you won't go off the road, and it's likely to stop more slowly than you if you catch the brake lights. Or, you can drive real fast into a cloud, slam on your brakes when you see lights a couple feet ahead of you going slowly, hope the person behind you sees your lights in time, and then slow down until there's visibility so you can speed up again and keep repeating the cycle. Of course, when a vehicle comes by going the other direction all visibility is lost for awhile too, including all sense of where the road is, and choices there involve braking and hoping the person behind is also braking, or keeping going and hoping you know where the road is-- if you're following someone's lights and can't see the stretch of road ahead this can be challenging.

I hung way back so I could see a clear full stopping distance of road ahead of me at all times, because I am just like that. Starting back I was behind a snowplough that was being followed by 2-4 cars in front of me (they were never at any point visible to me) and by the halfway mark home I had let maybe 30 vehicles pass including several logging trucks, a UPS van, etc. Note that none of them could pass the plough since the plough blocked visibility in both directions, so the line ahead of me just got longer and longer until the plough pulled over at the midway point and everyone went ahead.

It was a surreal experience in a lot of ways because of how quickly, easily, and completely vehicles disappear. I think one of the invisible vehicles immediately following the snowplough was a logging truck. I know at least 30 vehicles were ahead of me, led by a snowplough. But sometimes when the road did a long lazy curve it just looked a little bit snowy on the road and like there was no one there: something about the way the snow lifts and reflects makes it look more translucent than it actually is.

I got home without incident and with my winter driving caution re-tuned. It really is such a different beast than summer driving. Now I'm offloading the grain -- 2200lbs moved by bucket on top of the daily several hundred pounds of food and water carried by bucket out to animals. I'm moving slow. Cold steals my energy and this is a pretty intensive physical output too.

It'll get done though. One bit at a time.

Invisible

We've got the cold. I think it hit -34 in town last night, so likely -37 or so here.

The new-to-me truck won't start, I think it both needs a new battery and the engine heater isn't working. So that's fun.

Yesterday Tucker jumped the truck and I went down to go get feed. It was snowing-- I know better than to go by the forecast rather than the observed weather and that was supposed to be the clear window-- and snow was behaving how it always behaves in deep cold. That is, it turns into a dust storm.

Solidly below -20 snow not only doesn't clump at all, it doesn't stick to surfaces. This means that with good snow tires the roads are great - they're clear, and snow tires will stick to them like summers won't. But. There is a ton of effectively weightless dust along the whole road that's tossed up by passing vehicles and, when it's snowing, by snowploughs. The dust is super reflective so a vehicle can be fifteen feet ahead of you and completely invisible, and because of the way the snow kicks up you can still see a couple feet of clear road and then just an ambiguous haze in which the car is hidden.

That is to say, it was a slow drive down and back. Folks up here don't have a great sense for putting on their lights in these conditions (lights give maybe an extra 6-8' of visibility in a cloud like this). Different folks had different strategies: if you follow a logging truck about four feet behind it, for instance, you can see its lights and you won't go off the road, and it's likely to stop more slowly than you if you catch the brake lights. Or, you can drive real fast into a cloud, slam on your brakes when you see lights a couple feet ahead of you going slowly, hope the person behind you sees your lights in time, and then slow down until there's visibility so you can speed up again and keep repeating the cycle. Of course, when a vehicle comes by going the other direction all visibility is lost for awhile too, including all sense of where the road is, and choices there involve braking and hoping the person behind is also braking, or keeping going and hoping you know where the road is-- if you're following someone's lights and can't see the stretch of road ahead this can be challenging.

I hung way back so I could see a clear full stopping distance of road ahead of me at all times, because I am just like that. Starting back I was behind a snowplough that was being followed by 2-4 cars in front of me (they were never at any point visible to me) and by the halfway mark home I had let maybe 30 vehicles pass including several logging trucks, a UPS van, etc. Note that none of them could pass the plough since the plough blocked visibility in both directions, so the line ahead of me just got longer and longer until the plough pulled over at the midway point and everyone went ahead.

It was a surreal experience in a lot of ways because of how quickly, easily, and completely vehicles disappear. I think one of the invisible vehicles immediately following the snowplough was a logging truck. I know at least 30 vehicles were ahead of me, led by a snowplough. But sometimes when the road did a long lazy curve it just looked a little bit snowy on the road and like there was no one there: something about the way the snow lifts and reflects makes it look more translucent than it actually is.

I got home without incident and with my winter driving caution re-tuned. It really is such a different beast than summer driving. Now I'm offloading the grain -- 2200lbs moved by bucket on top of the daily several hundred pounds of food and water carried by bucket out to animals. I'm moving slow. Cold steals my energy and this is a pretty intensive physical output too.

It'll get done though. One bit at a time.

Visible

I've been making cleaning progress on my home. I've been making it mine in a way I had not before: instead of letting the inside just be function, I've been making it fit me. This means that, well, Threshold has always felt like the inside of the dryad tree that was my first MU* building project long back. It's all wood inside, it's tall and arched with wooden pillars and columns inside it, the little loft balcony overlooks the inside and the loft bedroom overlooks the outside, just like sitting in branches. The basement is warm and snug and dark and full of food and comfort, like the hollow between tree roots in winter.

When I was young-young, maybe 8 or 10 or 12, I painted the inside of my bedroom and all my furniture with a cave-art motif: sponge and rag painting to make an uneven stone-like surface, then potato prints of cave art figurines (because I still wanted an interior-design, repeat-not-freehand feel rather than an actual cave feel). To some extend I'm picking up on that sort of thing here: hand-crafted walls that fit the theme. I'll only do it if I know I won't sell soon, but.

That would look like doing some hint of bark or woodgrain on the few feature walls and columns in here, maybe with stamps since those are a thing now. It probably will look like leafy/frondy/vine accents. It'll look like getting my actual art and some functional items up on display.

Part of this is the perennial issue of figuring out where all my stuff actually goes. I'm probably going to end up with a bunch more of the clear-storage-bin stacks that folks seem to be using nowadays. Definitely shelving was the first step, and I'm pretty ok there, but the next step is to arrange things on the shelves in a reasonable, findable, and efficient way. It's also to shelve the few closets that I have, and to carefully curate what's in hidden shelves, what's in the carport, and what's on the (many) shelves out in the open. This is a balance between aesthetics and frequency of use.

Anyhow, little oases of aerogardens and grow lights are starting to spring up. They're driven by my desire to plant things: I will not put seeds in a pot if there's not plenty of room under a grow light for them. So, up the grow lights go, each finding new spots after I robed their shelves from the pantry.

I used to have my plants all crowded up by windows under additional growlights as a supplement; I remember being awed by Josh's little spotlights on each plant, each on a timer, throughout his house when I first visited him. Now I'm putting little oases of light everywhere and his are all up against a window.

It's good. But I do need more places to put plants. Time to figure out how to effectively growlight my hanging plants.