A little morning whining

You know what I've really gotten sick of? I mean, yes, I'm really damn tired of winter in general and all its accouterments, but the thing that REALLY makes me want to throw a tantrum is starting fires. The last week or so has been clear and gorgeous. Nothing to complain about there, right? Wrong.

The beautiful sunny days mean the house gets very warm during the day thanks to the glories of passive solar. Warm enough that I can just let the fire go out. But also thanks to this lack of clouds it gets positively frigid at night, zero or a little below, so if I don't want to wake up to home temps in the low forties (or worse) I have to start a fire again before I go to bed. And I'm sick of it. Sick of getting my hands covered in newspaper schmutz. Sick of using the bellows and coddling the little flames and breathing in the fine ash the bellows stir up and staying up late enough to make sure the fire is really going before I close the damper. I'm tired (literally) of setting my alarm for 2:45 am so I can get up and add another couple of logs. This wood stove nonsense has altogether lost its novelty and charm. So last night I just didn't do it. And while I was perfectly comfortable all night thanks to the mountains of down that compose my bed, this morning was very cold. I woke up at my usual time and started the damn fire and then went back to bed until it was warm enough to move around. (I don't think the cats appreciated my laziness. Sugar would crawl under the covers once an hour or so to warm up and then disappear again to wherever it is she normally sleeps. This is why I need 10 hours of sleep, Sugar wakes me up many many times every night. I'm chronically sleep deprived.)

Thanks to almost two years of experience and obsessive monitoring of my home's interior temperature, I now know the numbers that mean relative comfort. At the lower end of the spectrum, 48 is the magic number. Any colder than that and I need to stay in bed, but as long as the thermometer reads 48 or above I can wear enough layers to be comfortable anywhere in the cabin. At the upper end, my number is 84. During the day I don't mind at all if the cabin gets warmer than that; I love the heat, but 84 is the upper temperature at which I can fall asleep and not wake up 30 minutes later a sodden mess. In the summer there's just no point in going to bed until the temperature in the loft drops to 84 or below and some nights that doesn't happen until quite late.

And, I'm rambling. But I want to remember these little details, and I will forget if I don't write them down. Weather.com predicts the sun will not make an appearance for a few days so chances are I won't have to start a fire again for awhile because I won't be able to let the one I started this morning go out. We might get up to 10 inches of new snow this weekend. Winter is NEVER GOING TO END.

Magnet

That's the only thing I can come up with. Some joker at a Subaru plant thought it would be funny to embed a high-powered magnet in the rear driver's side wheel of my car. How else to possibly explain the fact that I've had three punctures, leading to three completely destroyed tires, in a little over a year? And every single one of them was the rear driver's side tire. I just don't get it!

Grumpy

I am in a foul mood today. Practically poisonous. The day started really crummy, when at 1 am I was woken by little claws scratching my arm as a tortured mouse ran across my body trying to escape from Freckles. I found the poor creature, critically injured, trapped between my mattress and the wall. There was nothing I could do. I wrapped it in a paper towel, struggling the whole time. When I tried to open the door it escaped, flopped out of my hands, performed these horrifying death spirals on the floor until I was able to get it outside, on the porch, where I left it to its fate. Then I cried. And tried to go back to sleep. Every time one of the cats jumped up to the bed I freaked out, turned on the light, and made sure she was alone this time. It was not a restful night, but the mouse had it much much worse. Oh god, I'm tearing up again just thinking about it. Now I know, worse than finding a dead mouse on your bed, is finding a dying one.

The day has gotten significantly less tragic, but not necessarily better. I'm bitter about being stuck at the spa when other people are relaxing (which, given my schedule as described in my last post, I know is completely ridiculous.) I'm annoyed and angry with one of the therapists, a friend, who was horribly unprofessional today and stuck me in an awkward position as a result. I just wrote a sentence saying that I was probably being unfair, and excusing her, but I deleted it. Because I'm not being unfair, and today, being tired, and grumpy, and sad I'm not in the mood to be accommodating. And did I mention that it's cloudy?

Broken

So the brand new sewing machine my mother bought me randomly decides it will only sew in reverse and then just as randomly changes its mind. Oh, and it also changes stitch sizes every two inches. Which is clearly fucked. And now, the battery charger for my brand new weed eating grasshog decided to stop working after charging a single battery once. What the hell is going on in Chinese factories? I mean, I knew about the toothpaste, the tainted clams, and the lead paint, but those were just poisoned products, not non-functioning ones. This impacts ME and it sucks. Royally. I just discovered that I actually kind of LIKE this particular form of yard work and now it's barred to me until I drive 200 miles to exchange this broken machine.

I guess, if I felt like putting a positive spin on things, I'd say yay, I have an excuse to go down to Boise next week. But it's now summer, and really really pretty, and I don't WANT to spend the $40+ in gas and one of my days off to exchange a grasshog. Even if I do throw in a trip to Anthropologie and a movie theater. Damn.