Black Friday in the woods

I'm at my folks' not-so-little cabin in the woods. Dad is upstairs with an Amishman named David, putting a hole in the roof for the chimney to a coal and wood stove my parents have bought. At some point they're going to have to go out onto the roof. It's snowing a little, so that should be all kinds of fun. Mom's in the living room, knitting and ignoring the banging from upstairs. Oreo (the cat, Delilah's daddy) is on her lap, under an afghan. I'm at the kitchen table, blogging. Pippin's shut up in the front bedroom so that she stays out of the way of the work. And also because she probably would stand there and growl at David all day.

There are at least eight inches of snow out there. It's probably closer to a foot. Dad just said that over by Ulysses and Bingham the sky was blue and the sun was out. Here where the solar panels need it we aren't getting much sun, so the generator's running. I'm using the battery on the laptop, partly so that I don't siphon off power that we might need later and partly because I don't really trust the generator. It fried my parents' hard drive last winter. Power surge, probably.

I'm using their phone line and an old AOL account of mine that I'm really glad I didn't close. It'd be a shame to get three posts away from the end of NaBloPoMo and miss one because of access problems. It didn't take long for me to forget how long things take with dial-up, though. Click. Wait. Click. Sigh.

The floor in the finished part of the house has been finished itself now. It is gorgeous. It's cherry wood, from trees that grew pretty much right where the wood is laying now. I've taken pictures, and when I get back home I'll post them. Pretty, pretty, pretty. I want hair this color. I wonder if I could take a photo of the floor to a hair dresser and say, "Make it look like this." I'm sure they've had stranger requests.

I made it to almost 8 o'clock before going to bed yesterday. I think I lasted that long because I fell asleep on the couch in the afternoon. Woke up when my sister called to say Happy Thanksgiving. She and Stretch are on a trip to Niagara Falls right now, celebrating their fifth wedding anniversary, which is tomorrow. Hard to believe it's been five years.

And that's it from over here today. If they finish getting the chimney installed and get the stove going, I'll post a shot of that, too.