Notes from Maine - 2025/02/16

We’re having another nice Sunday of snow. I’m using this storm to cull one of my weather apps. For the past week, one of my widgets has been saying 11-14” (28-35cm) for today, and the other was saying 2-4” (5-10cm) and then finally updated that to 3-6. If we get 3-6, I will delete the first app. If we get over 9, I will delete the second. I can’t have that kind of careless inaccuracy in my life. There’s one other possibility. If we get 6-9” (15-20cm), which is right between the two estimates, then I vow to delete all the weather apps on my phone and computer and I will live completely in the dark. 

My father would have said, “Oh, man, you a really tough. You’re going to show them.”

I already have the generator near the garage door and I started it last night. Last summer I had my electrical panel replaced and a new generator outlet installed near the driveway, so hooking up to the generator will be pretty easy this year (assuming everything works). For a while, they were saying that we would get a ton of freezing rain. I think the estimates of that have diminished, but we’ll probably lose power anyway. Any amount of ice makes us lose power. 

Yesterday, I rolled a character sheet for Dungeons & Dragons. Last time I did that was about 40 years ago. I remembered nothing—had to learn it all from scratch. My friends are going to have a campaign. It’s fun to see a couple who have been together for 25 years argue for twenty minutes about whether she rolled a 16 or 15. Nobody relented. I bet they’re still arguing right now.

Before the snow started, I was on a ladder cutting a hole in the side of my house. I mounted a big vent for the Range Hood so it can suck all the smoke out from the stovetop. A decade ago, when I remodeled the laundry room bath, I installed two vents in the outside wall. One was for the bathroom’s exhaust fan, and the other ran to the kitchen ceiling. I didn’t know at the time that Range Hoods require a much bigger pipe. So that’s why I had to make a new hole. It’s a straighter shot, which is helpful. Fewer bends work best for Range Hoods. Now I have to think of something interesting to do with that original vent pipe. It might be fun to shove an old Barbie doll in there and seal it up. 

At one point, years ago, my brother was trying to find where mice might be getting into my father’s basement. Under the “vestibule” (which was a breezeway between the garage and house that my father put walls on), in the crawlspace, my brother found some liquor bottles. We knew who left them there. One of Dad’s old friends would come to visit every so often and he was a closet drinker. I mean, they drank together, but this friend liked disguise the how much he was drinking, so he kept a private stash in the crawlspace. If ever there was a safe space to drink as much as you wanted without judgement, it was my father’s house. But people like to keep secrets even when nobody else cares, I suppose.

The secret things that I hide in walls and old vent pipes are never personal for me. I don’t have anything burning inside that I want to confess to future residents of this house. I prefer to make stuff up. Under tile, on a subfloor, I’ll write a long note talking about how I’m a prisoner in this place. In a wall I’ll leave a short story about the glowing eyes that peer through the windows at night. It might be fascinating for a future person to find an honest diary of daily life in whatever year I’m doing construction, but way less fun for me. People can find ordinary accounts of daily lives everywhere. I want to leave something bizarre and inexplicable. 

The snow isn’t particularly heavy right now, but it’s relentless. It’s just occurring to me that I won’t have a good way to measure the total snowfall. How am I going to know which app to delete if I can’t make the distinction between 5 and 6 inches? I haven’t cleaned the railing on the back deck yet. I’ll use that, I guess. Tonight, before I go to bed, I’ll take a measuring tape out back and check the railing. It won’t be accurate, but the stakes are low. I can be arbitrary if I want to be.

The horses are inside all day, so I’ll be doing double chores. Lots of shoveling in my future. 

Spring is only 32 days away!