• Location: Woodstock, NY
• Mood: not so bad
• Music: Iron and Wine, "Passing Afternoon"

"Sodom, South Georgia"

An odd night. A wild night on the mountain, the wendigo's breath rattling through the trees and roaring across the snow that fell all day yesterday. It woke me again and again, that wind. I got up just before dawn and stood at one of the kitchen windows, watching an incredibly bright Jupiter setting behind the trees. The night was so bright you could have read a newspaper out there, secondhand sunlight from the waxing moon reflecting off the snow. Which would sort of make it third hand. I went back to bed and slept a while longer, but the wind stayed with me, in my dreams.

Kathryn says the wind last night, this morning, was steady at 16-18 mph, with 30+mph gusts. And we're expecting the same today.

The winter here does not gnaw at me. Which is not to say I'm not still homesick. I very much am. But I'm not in a state of constant dread.

I began a new story yesterday, for the belated Sirenia Digest #108 (January 2015). For the moment it's titled "Stabbing the Face of Winter," but that might just be a placeholder. I did a respectable 1,226 words. Then some more preparatory work for the screenplay. I'm having to learn a program called Final Draft, which, fortunately, is fairly intuitive. Yesterday morning, Kathryn had filled the crock pot with three kinds of potatoes, apples, carrots, mushrooms, onion, garlic, bay, parsley, and thyme, then crowned it all with five chicken leg quarters. Dinner was fine, and afterwards I answered email. I'm reading Peter Matthiessen's Shadow Country. I also read "A new archosaur from the Manda beds (Anisian, Middle Triassic) of southern Tanzania and its implication for character state optimizations at Archosauria and Pseudosuchia." The new archosaur in question is Nundasuchus songeaensis. Spooky made chocolate chip cookies.

I hope today is as good and as productive.

Here are a few photos from the past two days:





It says a lot, this photo.



Marco mills about my feet.



The bold Marco Polo!



The view from the desk, yesterday.



A fine pot, indeed.

All photographs Copyright © 2015 by Kathryn A. Pollnac and Caitlín R. Kiernan



And I should get to work.

TTFN,
Aunt Beast