Heating, Cooling.

The temperature is bombing itself on up out there: an hour ago it was thirteen. Now it's twenty-one. Good morning, sunshine. The plan: when that coffee maker beeps, put some shoes on and go out and see if that new heater I stuck in the wall last evening kept the shed warm enough to give the woodstove a fighting chance.

It's been cold here. It's been so cold. They're saying mid-forties by mid-week, though, and I could go for that. This has been interesting, but I'm wanting something else, I think. The back yard is so beaten down by all these teens and twenties and all my walking and 2x4ing all over it that it needs some kind of semi-sustained above-freezing intervention. This coming week: truckloads of old shed to the dump. The truckloads of new shed, save for the siding, are just about hung up on the new shed. If you stick your nose in the breeze right, you can almost feel the early phase of this coming to a close, however many days late. Assuming I get the rest of the insulation up this weekend, that'll do it. There are gutters and soffits for the back—and eaves for the front and back—still to go, but let's not worry ourselves too, too much about that, OK? Let's count those as little minor late-afternoon diversions. Let's say that if I can get the uphill gable insulated today, then I'll be at the place where I can write in the afternoons, too.

Wood fire. The stubbornly plotless new novel. The coldest cold snap in recent memory. Sun like a January sun, like real winter, working its way across the lower edge of the sky.