Friday the promised weather showed up grayly.  After a walk around the ponds and

breakfast Linda left and I finally offloaded the immense pile of willowroots from the Chev and

used it to transport 25 gallons of water to the burnpile in anticipation of burning it,

weather permitting.  Linda called a couple of hours out, westbound 80 closed at Verdi, but she persevered and made it home.  Eventually.  Meanwhile here things cleared up cleared towards

evening but Saturday morning a smell of Skunk wafted in, the stench driven from under the bedroom porch by strong west winds [as well as the Inkies who’d become stinkies early on] which did not bode well for bonfires so I amused myself by moving firewood and later took the

’82 down to the lower pond to fill it with dead cattails Tara’d cut only to have the fuel pump self-destruct as soon as I started back. Not good, not shown.

There was, anyway, the studio to consider…

…or something much like it.

Ah well; Sunday came up clear, still and ten degrees which caused my precautionary waters at the pile to transform themselves into five five gallon ice cubes [or tubes] but a good day

for ignition nonetheless; what could go wrong, right?

Fortunately nothing did, though smoke drifted all the way to the Granites and beyond in

transformative still air…air which by late afternoon was blowing in a[nother] promise of winter.

As the winds increased I raked the ashes one last time and paid last respects to the Chev [until such time as we figure out what that replacement fuel pump is].  It may snow…or so it seemed.

Which indeed proved to be the case later that night so Monday, with mad north winds,

was crazy cold and definitively…winter.

Inkies, like all little kids, love the snow but if little kids have been spritzed by a skunk the snow

unfortunately renews the subscription.  It wasn’t as bad as two days ago, fortunately…

The porch proved a leetle chilly for a last lunch out as it’s definitely looking very

like rural northern Nevada winter around here and with the wind and a Famous Storm

expected to close roads over the Sierra not very much later in the week I’m expecting to be outa here Tuesday morning, you betcha.