It Wasn't Much Fun

"On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson Trail.
Talk of your cold! Through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see.
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGhee."
From "The Cremation of Sam McGhee" by Robert Service

If Sam McGhee had been driving a 4WD pickup, equipped with a good heater, instead of a dog sled team, he might not have whimpered so much. We made it to my grand daughter's and back without incident, but I'm glad we didn't have to go outside much. My grand daughter gave us her poinsettia plant because she was worried that one of her cats might eat it and get sick. It was dead by the time we got it home. I understand that poinsettias are vulnerable to cold drafts, which makes me wonder why they are known as a Christmas plant. Anyway, we didn't get a lot of snow, and the snow we did get was dry and fluffy, but they sure got the "blowing" part right! The wind has gone down by now, but so has the temperature, 5 above when I last checked, and heading south from there. It's supposed to be like this for at least the next week. So much for the Global Warming Theory!

My daughter gave me a trail camera. They have been all the rage with the sporting set for some time now, but I have never gotten around to buying one. You just hang it up in the woods and it automatically takes a photo whenever it senses motion. Some of them will even live stream the pictures to your computer in real time. This one doesn't, it has a memory card like any other digital camera, which is just a well because we don't have Wi-Fi in this neighborhood.

My grand daughter gave me a book, "Should the Tent Be Burning Like That? - A Professional Amateur's Guide to the Outdoors" by Bill Heavy. The following excerpt struck me as somewhat relevant:
"Four million years ago on the African savanna, a few of the more adventurous primates climbed down from the trees, stood up on two legs, and, at a crucial moment in evolutionary history, were eaten by giant hyenas. Sadly, the genetic material of those brave hominids (Greek for 'appetizers') is lost to us. The remaining proto-humans spent a terrorized night listening to the cracking of bones and murmuring to each other, 'Let's hang out here a while longer. '"