It's one thing to have a few bitter cold days now and then: that's just part of living in the north. But the cold has been unrelenting up here for more than a month; I can hardly remember a winter when it was below 0 degrees F. for so long. The Celsius readings have hovered around -19 to -23, and out in the country they've been in the minus 30s. Today is a heat wave - about 12 degrees F.! It feels almost balmy! The mountain of plowed snow in the studio parking lot has become a mountain range, and I'm grateful every day that I don't have to keep shoveling out a car that's parked on a city street: people are really having a hard time this year.
Between Christmas and New Year's, we built ourselves a new IKEA bed, and completely tore apart and rearranged our bedroom. Meanwhile, my husband's computer underwent an automatic operating system upgrade that trashed everything, so he spent a lot of the holiday week trying to reconstruct his digital life. Then the same thing happened to mine. We had daily backups, so there was little damage or loss, it was just a pain in the neck. He quickly got my computer back up and running, but yesterday I realized that all my accounting files for Phoenicia had been in a different location, and the data starting from the middle of 2016 was gone, and not backed up where it should have been. Today I began reconstructing them. Strangely, it hasn't put me into too bad a mood. Like many other things, I figure I'll just do a little bit every day, and eventually it will be done. The cliches run through my head: "No use crying over spilt milk"; "what's done is done."
We've also had the inevitable mid-winter colds, sneezing and coughing our way through the month. Unlike Europe, our January and February here in eastern Canada tend to be bright and sunny a lot of the time, so I haven't felt depressed by grey days. What the cold does is make me feel cooped up, because I can't walk: it's far too cold and far too icy underfoot for walking-as-exercise. So, although I try not to make New Year's resolutions, I did vow to get back to the pool and to some sort of exercise regimen. That began last week in earnest, and it does feel better.
A double-length cowl in progress, in Alegria yarn from Manos del Uruguay.
I'm working on the design and layout for the new book by Luisa A. Igloria that Phoenicia will be publishing in March, The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis. And I'm trying to draw a little every day, and finish a knitting project, and cooking soups and stews and baking bread, as well as reading The Odyssey again, along with two friends. We're each reading a different translation (I'm reading Fagles, the others are reading Wilson and Lombardo), one Book a day, and talking about them as we go - a perfect midwinter project that reminds me of Sicily and the Mediterranean, and the Greek cities we visited.
Circe turning Odysseus' men into swine, from The Golden Iliad and Odyssey, by Martin and Alice Provensen: the book that first hooked me on the classical myths, and still has my all-time favorite illustrations. The look on Odysseus' face, in the background, is priceless.
Wow, Beth - life and hard times on the northern and digital frontiers simultaneously! Stay warm, both...
Posted by: Dick | January 17, 2018 at 02:21 AM
Love this picture of you two!! Knew you would be staying busy during these tough weather spells. Enjoy your hibernation phase!!
xxoo
Posted by: Kathy Hughes | January 17, 2018 at 07:20 AM
To suffer colds as well as enjoying gangrene-inducing low temperatures seems like piling pelion on ossa. One might have thought - hoped, anyway - that the viruses themselves would have felt uncomfortable at -30C, disinclined to put on their après-ski boots and saunter out infecting people. But no, these sturdy fellows, conscious of, and conscientious about, their role in the human condition obviously operate under the same slogan as the US Postal Service which escapes me for the moment.
But the worst infliction must surely be psychological. The constant awareness that without the presence of certain modern-day artefacts the city you live in would not support human life. That you are there under sufferance, much like the Inuits in Inuit-land. That given a certain set of unfortunate circumstances cannibalism would be just round the corner, that neighbourliness would take on a much more sinister meaning.
Or am I allowing my imagination to run away from its host? Quaere: Is imagination warming?
Posted by: Roderick Robinson | January 20, 2018 at 02:50 AM
I remember a Christmas in Montreal long ago when my boyfriend and I walked through the city wearing our Canadian army coats (5.00 each). Looking and feeling like the monkeys in the Wizard of Oz at about 25 below.
It was about the same here in the mountains. Something that cheered me was seeing the empty shelves of wild bird food in the grocery store. We were all feeding them.
Posted by: Sharyn | January 22, 2018 at 08:41 AM
We know how to do this: projects, dressing in those wooly layers, communing with friends, making soup. The sun glints through my park's tree branches, a friend beckons to join her in the neighbourhood café for hot chocolate. Children bounce by in spherically-padded snowsuits; a man of at least seventy-five boards the bus, holding his skis, en route to a cross-country tour on Mt. Royal.
I feel more vital in the cold than in sticky heat. In this, my natural habitat, I relish winter but admit that freezing rain, which lays black ice on the roads, is scary.
Sorry to hear of your computer ailments.
Posted by: Duchesse | January 24, 2018 at 09:12 AM