My caffeine withdrawal was so bad last night that I had trouble sleeping from pains that seemed to emanate from the marrow of my femurs or perhaps from the ball and socket joints where my legs attach to my body. I didn't really notice this pain much when I was walking around, but it was impossible to ignore whenever I was lying or sitting still. But this pain is easily erased by taking Advil or other pain medications.
The pain actually reminds me of the mysterious testicular cramping I experienced several weeks or so after being fired from CollegeClub.com. At the time I remembered thinking that I would have gotten it checked out by a doctor if I still had my health insurance. Now, though, I'm thinking it's possible that the pain could have been centered in my legs and hip joints and I only thought it was coming from my testicles. (The locating of internal pain is notoriously imprecise.) It would make sense that I might unknowingly experience painful caffeine withdrawal once separated from the nine to five grind, with its endless coffee and hot water supplies (with which I would chain-drink caffeinated Lipton tea all day).
This morning when I took the dogs for their walk, I continued work on a new stick trail passing through the tip of the new property we're buying. The new trail appears on the following map as a curved light light-cyan-colored line. Since it passes next to a large bluestone boulder, I'm calling it the Boulder Trail.
Trails in this map include:
In brown: the "Mountain Goat" or "Lower Trail" or "Gully Trail"
In red: the "Main Stick Trail" (it was the original)
In orange: the "Overlook Trail" or "Canary Hill Summit" trail.
In light cyan: the "Boulder Trail"
In purple: the "Chamomile Headwaters Trail"
I've superimposed a fade-in/fadeout photocopy of a map showing the new property as a long, narrow light blue rectangle slashing through from northwest to southeast. (The positioning of this map is somewhat imperfect, due to various inaccuracies, some of which are my fault and some of which were the faults of the original map makers.)
The weather was warm and extremely windy today, with temperatures reaching as high as 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the basement was still basically a cold trap filled like a deep puddle with 50-something-degree air, I threw open the windows and doors and allowed the warm breeze to blast through. This effectively harvested the warm air and radically improved the comfort of the entire house over the course of only about a half hour. In our case the great thing about storing up heat from a fluke weather condition is that the process works as quickly with a big house as it does with a little one, although the value of doing so with a large house is greater in proportion to its size.
