things you won't often hear me say

so yesterday i was going to write you but then i noticed that my blog was still on its summer colors and i changed that over to the winter colors because somewhere along the way autumn seems to have disappeared completely and i was JUST about to begin writing something about thanksgiving camp or something...

...when the power went out.

and then it came back in the afternoon...

and then out again this morning.

because it's been pretty much snowing nonstop for some days and really HARD this last two days and you know i am not likely to say this but at this point even *i* would enjoy a break in the snow.

too cold

traditionally i go camping for thanksgiving.

and this year i had planned to go today with a friend and then have another friend join us thursday night and another on friday so PARTY but the weather forecast for tonight has the temperatures dropping into the LOW single digits with steady winds of fifteen miles an hour. the temperatures are not expected to rise above twelve degrees and the wind isn't supposed to be less than 13 mph until midmorning friday and i hope i do not need to tell you that this represents a dangerous situation, beyond what you ought to do on purpose.

so i'm going to sit on my ass for an extra two days and we'll go camping, all of us, on friday.

i've been driving in and out of the park every couple of days to pack down the snow and keep it accessible (important because the one friend has a broken foot and just had a plate and pins installed and while i'm happy to sled my gear in, it's really important to be able to drive right to camp this time), and while i'm there i drop off firewood at our site.

and for the record because i know peg will ask, yes, being in the woods is lovely and relaxing if you are comfortable. especially in winter when it is deserted.

you just wear proper gear, and if it's cold at night you have proper insulation.

i have proper clothing and a crapton of gear (i partially outfit my friends as well) and there's something very satisfying about being outside at 20 degrees and being toasty warm. you just build a hot fire and keep drinking hot beverages and when it's bedtime you burrow in.

without any particular modifications my regular setup is good down to 15 degrees. with modifications it will be good down to five. after friday morning temps will not be below ten again for a week or so, and that should get me to the end of my trip.

absolute zero

i can't seem to get it together for blogging, so i'm going to tell you a story from a really long time ago.

like my junior year of high school. the two biggest fuckups in my chemistry class, dave and i were dumped together as lab partners because nobody else wanted us. if you had a chemistry lab, we could get it significantly wrong.

so there was this experiment to extrapolate the value of absolute zero because it's a thing you do in high school chem.

dave and i set to work cautiously but steadily, as if we tried hard and never got anything right.

and at the end of the lab we're drawing our line graph and ours looks NOTHING LIKE anybody else's, but we had a pretty straight line that came out at -274 celsius and we shrugged our shoulders and decided to turn it in anyway, because what the hell, we had tried out best and if our results were terribly wrong and different than everyone else's, it wouldn't be the first time it had happened. we were immune to the disapproving eyerolls of debbie and dickie and peggy and the other kids who didn't fail every chem lab. we looked at each other and said "well, if your'e going to fail, fail big."

so the chemistry teacher looks at our paper and calls us up to talk to him. and he's getting all ready to drop cheating on us and we were all like "if we were going to cheat, why would we have picked a result SO TERRIBLY WRONG?"

it turns out that dave and i have no actual clue what the value of absolute zero is in celsius. we have in our minds some OTHER number that to this day i don't know what it was, but it was not anywhere near -273.15

i'm not sure what else that teacher did that day when he was out of class, but i'm pretty sure laughing was a part of it.

bad, bad blogger

i have been a very bad blogger.

because to be a good blogger you need to be writing things.

i've been camping, and doing girl scout things, and learnings. OH SO MANY LEARNINGS.

also playing ingress a little crazily and also reading books.

oh. and since the day before halloween i've been playing the google doodle game.

https://www.google.com/doodles/halloween-2018