My draft plans for the house are being massaged by a professional.  A witcher was brought out to the building site and found a location for the well.  The bathroom in the shop has been completed (aside from some painting).  Things move ahead, albeit, at a slower pace than that at which Greenland is shrinking.

So I have very little to report on the project per se but I did not want this blog to get too stale and figured now was a perfectly good time to tell a story.

Sometime in the mid-1980’s my family lived in a very interesting house in Idaho.  It was probably as tall as it was wide (there were two levels (out of at least five) that each consisted of a single room) and sat on a hill way up above Idaho Falls (you could see all of the city from there as well as miles and miles of farmland).   My mother would look out on the breathtaking view and wonder aloud why everyone seemed to choose to live all packed together in the valley, along the Snake River, when they could have much more space and views.

Then we had our first winter.

Understand that I was in college at this time and was home for the winter break.  It snowed and snowed and eventually snowed us in.  Granted, it was a beautiful snow – so white it looked blue – and there was a certain romance to it.  When my sister, her husband, and their new baby came to visit, I was tasked with dragging their luggage up the hill from the point at which their car would no longer go.  It was fun.  Honest.

But then we ran out of propane.

The snow was so very thick that the truck could not get to us, and I suppose we did not plan sufficiently ahead so that we would have enough to get through the blizzard.  So at some point we all gathered around the fireplace, put on some electric heaters, and shivered our fists at the rest of the cold house.  It might just have been one evening – and I suspect we got plowed out the very next day – but it’s something to remember: how quickly a modern home will cool off without an exogenous heat source.

The house we are currently building should never be in such straights.  We’ll gather around the fire because we want to, not for fear of frostbite. 

One irony is that it would have been easy to have had that house built of straw: every year we would sit out front and watch the burning of the wheat fields.  All that straw just went up in smoke when it could have gone to a better use than the shrinking of Greenland. 

You’re reading this blog, you know the rest.

Below is a snippet from a comic strip that is penned by a fellow I went to undergrad with and whom many people thought was actually me (due to a photo of the cartoonist in the student press that did indeed make us resemble each other – that and my cartoon-ish wit and sartorial style).  It makes me laugh because he penned it, but even more so because it is a scene that my wife and I recreate every now and again: she asks me to tell her a story.  I am bad husband since I rarely do…. I should change that.