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dry white pine before January rains
Wednesday, January 14 2026
I went out again this morning with the big Kobalt chainsaw (this time with the smaller knock-off battery) to pre-process some dead trees. Most of the wood I ended up cutting with it ended up being some tall semi-skeletonized white pines near where the Woodshed Path joins the Stick Trail, that is, very close to home. But it's really good to have bone-dry pieces of white pine, particularly for a fire started in a cold stove. I ended up retrieving three backpack loads of firewood today, two of which consisted mostly of white pine and the other of which was mostly white ash from that big fallen tree 100 feet west of the where the Stick Trail crosses the Chamomile. Rain was predicted for later today and I wanted to gather all this wood before it got wet. By now I'd gathered so much wood that I had to put some of it in the second tranche in the woodshed outside.
I'd taken another 120 mg dose of pseudoephedrine and wanted to "buy" the right to do some booze consumption. So I started work on a painting of Charlotte and Neville frolicking in the snow based on a photograph taken in March of 2024. Then I drove with the dogs to Uptown to get some supplies: beans, broccoli, canned tomatoes, and tempeh from Hannaford, new headlight bulbs for the Forester from Advance Auto Parts, and a half gallon of cheap gin and a litre of cheap scotch from JK's Liquor. Though it was cloudy and occasional droplets of rain were falling, conditions were balmy for mid-January, and Kingston's demimonde, the people who wait to catch a bus in front of the Hannaford (the main reason we refer to it as "Ghettoford"), weren't too uncomfortable where they sat.
When I took Charlotte for her afternoon walk at 3:00, there was so little snow on the ground that I did in Crocs for the first time this year. I have the kind of old-school Crocs with holes into my toes just above the sole, so stepping in any snow at all in those is always a bad idea.
I made my usual Wednesday night spaghetti dinner, this time cooked with broccoli and with a pan full of tempeh, onions, and crimini mushrooms.
Tonight after Jeopardy!, Gretchen and I watched the first episode of The Rehearsal, a big-budget reality show someone is coached to do something they find difficult via intense rehearsals using detailed mock environments. But it's even crazier than that, because even the first meeting between the show's "rehearsalist" (Nathan Fielder) and the person being coached is rehearsed, with detailed mockups of their home environment being created after information is gathered by covert means (utility workers sent to check the gas, say). It's a fun concept for a show, though it wasn't quite as hilarious as Gretchen (who'd already watched most of this epsiode in something of a rehearsal itself) had led me to believe.
Today's painting. Click to enlarge.
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