Winter blew in over the weekend with wind driven rain and a few thunderclaps. We only lost power for two hours. Saturday the temperature hit 70, today it's struggling to rise above freezing.

I'm already looking forward to April or at least the beginning of March which normally doles out the occasional warm day. During the winter months the space heater in the office runs morning until night and the floor downstairs numbs your soles. I let the taps drip when we go to bed. Each morning I get up hoping I don't need to squeeze into the crawlspace under the house and hold the heat gun on a frozen water pipe.

We haven't been iced or snowed in yet, rather surprisingly. Cold temperatures and the smallest bit of moisture render the grassy hill up to the right-of-way and the precipitous, twisting macadam track down to the road impassible. If you've read this blog for more than a year you've heard all this before. I need a four-wheel drive vehicle. I need to win the lottery too.

From now until spring my wife and I will be weather report junkies, waiting days when the ground is totally dry or when the temperatures are above freezing for long enough to insure that whatever snow and ice has formed is temporarily liquid. Those are escape days, grocery and post office days. They can be few and far between.

All the other days are workdays. Winter is a good time to work. When you freelance it is good to have work. It is good to have a cottage that was never intended to be occupied during the winter because then you can afford to freelance. As long as there's work, freelancing is good.

I don't like to get up, turn on the tap, and hear the pipes rattle and clank and see three drops of water emerge from the faucet. It's never fun to go out into a biting sub-zero wind, to clear the frozen, drifted snow away from the door in the foundation and slide into the foot high crawlspace, feeling the frozen dust against my back, my nose practically brushing decayed, moldy insulation, and squirming, heat gun in one hand flashlight in the other, through tattered, hanging webs, probably filled with frozen spiders big as my palms.

But it's better than going in to the office.