Although I can not say I have enjoyed the month of January thus far, I feel grateful for the work and very proud of myself for having endured it with some degree of equanimity. There are still a few days of work scheduled in a location that I find challenging, so I will continue to suspend and freeze my emotions and carry on with a smile. At no time can I afford to care how I actually feel. At some point, I will need to purge the feelings generated by the unbalance.
The weather report yesterday predicted that the low temperature last night would be -17C. It was much colder than that. The thermometer outside the kitchen window registered at -25C this morning. The heat dissipating from the walls of the house means that the outdoor temperature is usually a degree or two colder than what we read on the thermometer by the window. We have confirmed this with thermometers placed well away from the house.
When the weather gets this cold we need to fire the masonry heater three times a day to keep up. If there is a wind, then three firings will maintain the interior of the house at an acceptable temperature, but I will need to wear boots, many layers of clothing and gloves with the fingers cut off, for the duration of the cold snap. These cold mornings call for warming one’s clothing and dressing in front of the masonry heater.
Attila received a sprouting kit as a Christmas gift, along with a variety of seeds. We have been enjoying fresh sprouts for weeks. In the winter our diet relies heavily on frozen and root vegetables, so the home grown fresh sprouts are a treat. I would like to try mung bean sprouts, but that will have to wait because the nearest store that might sell them is over an hour away by car on a high speed highway, and that would be a very special trip, seldom made in the winter.
This blog, which is really a bulletin-board-personal-journal, is a venue for my personal thoughts and opinions. It is not a private affair, as paper diaries often were in previous eras. One of my favourite books is a collection of personal journal entries by women over a number of centuries. The freedom of thought in these writings is markedly different than what I am reading on blogs. How differently humans present themselves when they perceive that someone is “watching”. There is a tension in the writing that did not previously exist. Bulletin-board-personal-journals, aka blogs, are no longer the trustworthy receptacles of completely honest expression. We have lost our sense of personal privacy, and in a way a degree of our sense of self, in publishing a blog.
In my opinion, there is no intimacy or trust online, and human cultures world wide are less robust as a result.
Worldly Distractions
Weather
-25 °C
Condition: Mostly Cloudy
Pressure: 101.8 kPa
Visibility: 16 km
Temperature: -25.0°C
Dewpoint: -27.5°C
Humidity: 80 %
Wind: calm
Quote
“True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise; it arises, in the first place, from the enjoyment of one’s self, and in the next from the friendship and conversation of a few select companions.”
Joseph Addison
1672 – 1719