Repairs
Early this morning the plumbers were here to fix the burst and frozen pipes. As I stepped outside and turned my head to look at their trucks, I slipped and fell on some ice and cut up my left knee. I've been hobbling around in the sleet that just started, watching out for black ice hiding under snow. Between the power outage, no water, cold buildings, a dead hard drive, and a cut knee, it has been a rough week! But life is like a sine wave, and whenever things are looking bleak, they always seem to turn around in time.
My hard drive is still in the hospital, about to have a transplant, so I spent the afternoon at the local coffee shop, next to a ponytailed man who liked to start his sentences by saying, "I always say." Talking about some local mountain climbers who disappeared in the forest over the weekend, he said, "I always say, there is only one way to come into this world, but many ways to go out of it." And then, talking about a neighbor's tree house that just collapsed in a gale, he said, "I always say, what goes up has got to come down." There was another group of loud-talking old men, arguing about how many millions of dollars Tiger Woods is likely to pay his wife when they get divorced. I couldn't take any more of the local banter, so I returned to Caldera, and walked down to the lake, which was covered with flaky bits of ice that looked like snowy flowers, making me feel like a winter gardener furrowing a frozen field.