This month turned out to be more action than talk! It took about two weeks of serious effort to stack the wood – just in time for when that white stuff suggested we needed a fire. How many hours went into this is hard to say. Stacking wood is, after all, both art and science. Under Bill’s mentorship, I’ve learned to search for the exact right piece for each place, which yields a far better result than having a fair amount of woodpile descend sooner or later on the unsuspecting gatherer. This happened to me a few times (about 30 years ago) but the impression was indelible. I did much, maybe even most of the stacking, but Bill did a lot as well. Of course, when I realized he was going to work on it, I was motivated to sneak out and start stacking before he could get there, so psychology helped get the wood stacked. Oh, and there’s mystery to wood-piles too – I’ll never completely understand why rocks seem to be part of the delivery. In case it's hard to estimate the size of this woodpile, we paced it out at about 30 feet long, six feet wide and five feet high!
The October 15 snowstorm was one of the earliest on record, but fortunately didn’t last long. I “enjoyed” it mostly from inside – for the past week I’ve had another early first – a nasty flu that sent me to bed with fevers that kind of came and went. Because I'm the wrong age-group for swine flu, it's got to be the other kind - and by now it's probably also fair to say I've got enough naturally-acquired immunities so I won't need a flu shot. Who'd have thought feeling green (around the gills) could be (ecologically) green as well?
At least, getting the woodpile done meant finally having a chance to tat. Lots of ideas want to come out in tatting. Here’s one of them, a Celtic-style snowflake with eight interwoven arms. It's slated for the next issue of Tatting Times. The next ideas are clamoring to be tatted - I can almost feel the thread I picked out vibrating!

Inspiration... it's a wonderful thing. But for the immediate future, I've got an awful mess in the yard - it's this winter's fuel supply, four cords of the good stuff (plus about half a cord left from last year). This is the pile with about half a cord already removed and stacked, with Bill's truck in the background, for scale. It's absolutely enormous. It comes in a dump truck of the size used by road crews to dump gravel on the highway when they're doing a really major job and don't want to make a lot of little trips. So instead of creating lovely new designs - and realizing this term is relative anyway - guess what I'll be doing for a while with whatever free time I have? At the moment, about five teenage boys with a surplus of energy could do great work here but alas, I don't know any close by.
Just want to quote someone I met at work, an artist who explained her work - which did not seem to include wood-stacking in the deal. Her name is Candy Lucas and she described her art as "neo-representational eclectic surrealism seeped (NOT steeped, she insists, but seeped) in metaphysics with a dash of psychedelic spirituality." I haven't seen her work, but I liked the words.