Oh, bother. Here comes the wind.

Yesterday at the Lair I fired up M's tractor - which has been parked there the past two weeks - to drive it through the wash back to Landlady's property. The wind was picking up, and by the time I'd made half the trek I was getting sandblasted pretty good. After a pretty nice week we're due for some rain, and a major change in weather is often heralded by a windy afternoon. This one was not a record - a record is when you spend the evening wondering if anything not bolted to concrete is going to stay upright - but it was pretty damned windy. At one point just before dark I heard a series of crashes. Going to investigate I found that the back door of the Big Doghouse had blown open, a shelf had fallen, and empty gasoline cans were flinging themselves out the door, one by one. After righting the shelf and collecting the cans, I braced the door shut with a big rock. So I sort of expected to wake this morning to radically different weather.

Last Wednesday the building supply truck delivered a whole bunch of insulation and other stuff to the Meadow House, and in anticipation of rain I carried/dragged/rolled all that stuff up the unreasonably steep approach to the house and got it under cover. I was up kinda late last night reading, and so didn't wake this morning till nearly six. Little Bear, who had apparently decided I'd died, was getting kind of upset. So I was surprised when I stuck a toe out and found the morning quite pleasant for mid-November. Now it's nine in the morning and I hear the wind starting to moan again outside the scriptorium. Probably that weather change isn't a fiction.

I'm still making slow progress on the Lair. I've tried one thing, probably futile, to fix the cracks in the toilet's tank before unbolting it and dragging it out for a trip to the dump, and this morning I'll find out if it still leaks. It probably will. With the help of Neighbor J, I got the woodstove and thick concrete pedestal into place in the Lair only to find that the pedestal won't work at all. I poured it on a nice thick piece of plywood to make sure the bottom was flat, but for some reason it really isn't. Also, it's just too much. So I dragged it back outside, and now I'm thinking of lining the floor under the stove with cement board and tiling it before mounting the stove. That means that somehow I've got to get some big floor tiles. Also, though I have enough 8" stovepipe to go between the stove and the ceiling box I haven't figured out how in the world I'm going to cut and install it. People tell me what I need is a bottom section of slightly larger diameter that will slide into place, but if such a thing exists for 8" pipe I'll have to journey fifty miles or so to find it. Which, since I'm afraid of getting stopped by cops while driving somebody else's Jeep, means I have to find a neighbor who just happens to be going there and that doesn't happen every day. I have the lower part of the loft ladder in place and it works great, but I had to delay installing the upper part until I'd finished the loft paneling that goes under it. That's been a sort of "when you don't feel like working on anything else" project, but it's nearing completion. I've now got three rungs installed above the loft floor and it definitely helps this stiff old one-legged man get up and down from there.

I also need one lousy plumbing fitting for my septic barrels, and I'm hoping to cajole Landlady into making a Lowe's stop for me on her way up, if she comes up tomorrow.

Getting a little colder every day, on average. If I really plan to spend the winter in my new cabin, I've got to get off the stick.