Way too cold! W I N D B L O W N >>>>>>-----

Whoa, this a blow hard winter. Wind is a big problem for us here. Our temp isn't too bad but in combination with the wind it is deadly. The wild north wind comes whipping down the river and right through this old house. How folks have lived here for 140 years through the winter is a mystery to me. I suspected it to be an effort not worth applying, I was right. This should be just a three season house. As of this moment we have a frozen hot and cold water lines in the bathroom, frozen hot water line in the kitchen and one frozen heating zone, the two other zones we expect will soon freeze. We did get carry over oil, but it hasn't helped against the wind. Cold is fine, just uncomfortable. Wind is cruel, suscinct and deadly. insidious. It seeks and finds the slightest weakness in your system and moves on in like molten hot fudge spreading over a dish. Unfortunately, the frozen pipes the wind causes are not the delight that hot fudge is! If the wicked north wind doesn't let up soon, I fear for what we are going to be able to recover without a devastating financial disaster.

I will say one thing. It is spectacularly beautiful. Last night we had a power failure, which complicated things significantly.  We had no heat, as of the moment the power went out. Fortunately our fabulous neighbors bailed us out and when one invited the other over to sit by the fireplace during the outage, they asked if they could bring us too. God bless them. That is the warmest I have been in years! The power came on five hours later and when we returned home we were walking out in the deep freeze flooded by fabulously bright moonlight, and nearly as bright stars. The skies here cannot be described, they must be experienced. They are spectacular and fascinating. The entire sky is covered with winking stars.

When I woke up this morning there was ice from the shoreline extending out several hundred feet towards where the river and the creek meet. The ice is beginning to pile up, it looks much like snow..but there has not been any snow here for a couple of weeks. All that looks like snow, must be frozen sea spray from the waves crashing as the temps dropped below freezing. Several of the neighbors have oyster seeding set ups of some sort and those things look like giant snowball hanging from lines on their docks. When I took a walk out to the waters edge to take some photos I thought I was going to end up back at the street. The scene along the waterfront was awesome, but I had a fear of being blown down onto it for a closer look. It would have been a painful trip, considering the ten foot drop! Anyway, not much is happening with inproving our world. For this moment the focus is survival, and preserving the status quo, not my favorite mode.

Take a look at my photos and you will get the idea. See if you can find my shadow, the bold and happy brown thrasher flitting around the shoreline, and the oyster cultivations.