Bring in the brass monkeys

When I was a child, there was always a stretch in January when plugging the car in wasn't good enough, and my dad used to bring the battery into the house to ensure the car would start in the morning.

This is the first winter I can remember in ten years of being back in Calgary where the weather reminds me of those days -- there's actually a lot of snow in January (granted, there wasn't until a week or so ago) and a stretch of really stinking cold weather.

It was nice most of last week, even above freezing yesterday, but turned seriously nasty again this morning, and there are windchill warnings for temperatures of -46C or so over the next day or two. (For you Fahrenheit folks, that's -50F.) Time to dig out my calf-length down-filled coat again to walk to work.

One advantage to this weather is that I really need to give our freezer a good cleaning and the easiest way will be to put everything into boxes out on our deck. Whatever's in the fridge will go into our big cooler, with the heating pad on low, and stashed outside as well.

Lots to do coming up: the next grant application is due in just over two weeks, How to Make a Peacock Fly to finish, What I Felt and The Zebra Book to ship off, and get organized for the two residencies I'm applying for.

For one of those residencies, I'm going to repitch (and recast) My Past Life, which is turning into a seriously major undertaking. Between the spinning, design, and knitting on the fibre side, not to mention the book end of things. It demands time, and space, and serious pursuit of technologies I don't have at home and don't possess the technical skill to execute.

Well, yet, anyway.