Kick those white mice and black dogs out

This here weirdo post-clock-change NaDruWriNi is like Halloween fifteen years ago in reverse: dark an hour early. Gotta get started to make up for that extra hour we're not getting in the middle of the night. Time to get fuelling!

Getting Punchy

This is Punchy McPunchface. He will be the muse of NaDruWriNi.

Well ... how did I get here?

Like I said to the_siobhan the other day, NaDruWriNi really has become the fulcrum on which my whole year turns: it is the official Last Night at the Cottage. There may be further nights at the cottage, and this year there will be, but they are unofficial bonus nights. This being the latest possible NaDruWriNi this year, and later than I felt forced to take the water apart last year, I knew it might be a challenge to make it ... but I had no idea how much of a challenge it would be. If I'd known what the weather was going to be like around last weekend a week or two in advance, I almost certainly would've thrown in the towel. The temperature bottomed out around -12 or -13 in Bancroft. I was up literally all night three out of four nights running the water, at times every ten minutes, to keep the plumbing from freezing. The last morning of that, the power went out for a second or so three times, with the temperature well below freezing, the wind blasting the cold under the cottage through the pipes, and I guess at that point over 24 hours to go until the temperature got more than a fraction of a degree above freezing again. I was, let me tell you, reader, SCARED AS FUCK. But the power hung in, the pipes did not freeze solid, nor did the pump (which I had swaddled like a Christ-child experiencing homelessness, to be pleonastic about it), and life went on. The ducks continued to come: oh ducks, oh ducks, oh ducks. (32 goldeneyes today that I counted!) Florida fucked with my brain, as it fucked with yours. My father came out of his 14-day quarantine at the home in which he was, two weeks ago, installed, in the muddle (OK, I have been automatically correcting typos, but that one stays) of COVID. Today it was twenty fucking degrees centigrade around here, and I look around the lake at all the people with their winterized cottages, who weren't here last weekend because it was too fucking cold, and I think you people have no fucking idea.

That may or may not be the half of it.

First up: Raven Conspiracy red wine (pictured to the right of Punchy McPunchface).

and say reprovingly

Well, Raven Conspiracy red wine has gotten me nowhere this time, chum, so it's time to break out the big guns: on to the Writer's Tears, redux, which B. gto me to celebrate the acceptance of the groundhog poem, I think, and which I squirreled away, fittingly enough, for just this contingency. It is as delicuous as I remember. But I think maybe I won't drink 2/3 of the bottle this time.

Ducks, wonderful ducks

On one hand, it's accidental that NaDruWriNi happens right in the rush of duck season, and so the ducks are right there for me to write about. On the other hand, the ducks are the other thing I stayed up those three nights to be here for. (Poem fragment follows in locked entry ... unfortunately many poetry magazines are insanely jealous about this kind of thing, so I gotta be a douchebag about it. Or, well, really only apparently insanely, but actually pretty reasonably, which I'll get to some other time.)

I dunno

maybe I should just complain about Doctor Who

or nostalgize about the second season of Capaldi

or seomthing

(I realized a few months ago that Capaldi is absolutely my favourite Doctor. Fora long time I thought it was a tie between him and Tennant, but it is totally Capaldi. I mean, just for that one season. But ahat one season is everything.)