Moderating Pattern.

Maybe it was the Christmas lights. I unplugged them this afternoon so I could use the extension cord to hook up the chop saw to cut eleven-foot ceiling joists in half to fit in the truck to take to the dump, and behold and lo, both, it turns mild. I'm not saying you don't want to run the heat tonight, but I am saying that if you had an as-yet inconsistently-heated outbuilding, it might not be a huge problem to bring it up to temp tomorrow via the woodstove only. Or I'm saying: the ongoing series of experiments to see if the building can be heated overnight may not yield useful dividends this evening, as it will only be dropping into the low thirties instead of the low tens and teens.

And it'll be warmer tomorrow. We edge in the afternoon toward—probably not to, but toward—sixty.

Don't be alarmed, friends and fans of Carolina winter: forties and semi-serious rain on Saturday night and Sunday. That's woodstove weather if there ever was any.

Trying to write. Wee crisis of confidence this week. Trying to write on through that. It's been hard to get at the forecast this year. It's been hard to get at anything. I haven't even changed over the rainfall totals. That's coming. A quarter-inch on the year. More coming this weekend. Sometimes, the sentences, they do not come. And sometimes, even when they do, it gets hard to believe in any part of them.

Milder weather on the way, on the whole. Still chilly. Still winter. But not so tin-skillet cold.