January was a warm, near snowless month, a much-needed break after December’s storms. February is a very unpredictable month, as we’re seeing right now. It’s coming down hard – I thought that this might just be a squall, but perhaps not. I’m home, Pete’s home, it’s sort of like a late night snow day – I drove home just as the storm was gaining momentum, relived to have gotten back here without a mishap.

I’m getting good at driving in gnarly conditions. The two things that I’ll never be good at will be driving in the dark and driving on multi-lane highways and freeways. My vision is such that I’m not able to discern how distant any vehicle might be. It’s for this reason that I do not tailgate.

This morning I missed a Zoom meeting – I got the time wrong. When I do this, I wonder if I’m losing it. I suppose that if I didn’t care or take note of it that I’d be losing it. My mental acuity isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still pretty good, or at least this is what I’m telling myself.

Alys and dogs look at snow

I grabbed a few totes of young adult books from my cabin, loaded them into the car, then drove to Sutton where I dropped off two boxes of children’s books at the Sutton Elementary School. I next went to the Sutton Post Office and put some fiction books in the revolving bookcase.

On to town, drove to the Meeting House and did upstairs work, got books ready for Robert to drop off at Jitters Coffeeshop, and sorted through some of the boxes that came in this past weekend. The primary donor was an avid science fiction reader. I can only wonder how it is that someone could read that many genre-specific books – I had a hard enough time moving them into boxes and bins. I wasn’t even able to finish doing what I set out to do.

I next worked downstairs – it’s interesting, my upstairs and downstairs worlds seem like they are two differing places. The fiction and kid’s books are upstairs, and the nonfiction is downstairs. I’m now working on having the windowsill wall of the library room at the Meeting House be for hardback and for the other wall to be for paperbacks. The far wall will remain the domain of the Alaskana books.

After working upstairs and downstairs, I did some distributing. The Vagabond Blues shelves were in a state of disarray – and the books that were supposed to be in the nutritionists’ bookcase were all over the floor. I let it be known to one of the nutrition store workers that this was completely unacceptable.

He understood what I was getting at.

I headed home in what was now a storm – I drove carefully and slowly. I didn’t white knuckle it as I often do; rather I took this storm as a matter of course. It helps that Jim’s old car, who I call The Great White Hope, runs well and holds her own in bad conditions.

Next: 28. 2/7/23: State of the Farm Address