Frozen firewood throws off a cold heat

When I walked the hounds this morning the temperature was -35 degrees C. Had I known that when I set out, I would not have set out.

I like to start my day with a brisk walk in the bracing cold. Lucy and Boomer have fur coats that allowed their ancestors to survive a million years of evolution before we domesticated them into lazy-ass moochers who want to do nothing but sit by the fire and fetch your slippers.

They're OK with the cold.

Me? Not so much.

Luckily, first thing in the morning, I am not yet "firing on all cylinders" as the saying goes. In fact, many a morning has turned to afternoon before there is much of a spark in some of those cylinders.

No matter. I find nothing clears the head like a brisk walk in the bracing cold, and my head was really clear by the time we got back this morning.

Ya, it's been one hell of a cold winter. From what I read in the news it's been one hell of a winter all over the place. Heard they had a snow-storm in Jerusalem today. No doubt there will be some debate in the Holy Land about whether this is the work of Allah or Jehovah.

Or Satan.

Funny how nobody can agree on the name of God but everybody agrees the name of the bad guy is Satan.

Funny how everybody can agree that record cold and record snowfall everywhere from Boston to Birmingham to Berlin to Beirut to Jerusalem is caused by something we call "global warming."

But I'm not getting into that debate...

Me and Boomer and Lucy hike down to the corner and head up the Burgess side road. Half a mile up there we pick up Bella. That's the neighbour's dog. One thing I love about Falling Downs is that the neighbours are a half mile away.

At Falling Downs you can piss from the porch or even from the balcony and nobody ever cares.

That's the kind of shit that can get you in the newspaper when you do it in town... and not in a good way.

Me and the hounds head a couple miles down the side-road and turn around by Harvard's place. Harvard got his name because he actually attended that fabled Boston institution of higher learning for a year.

Then his scholarship ran out, and he was back in Bruce County.

Even though I'm a high-school drop-out, I enjoy matching wits with Harvard. He's not one for cold weather walks, but now and then his dog comes out for a bum-sniff with the other hounds.

By the time I got home my water bottle was iced up.

But the temperature inside Falling Downs HQ was closing in on 80 degrees F.

The Farm Manager was sitting near naked in front of her computer with the temperature outside setting record lows.

I'd topped off the furnace with a load of frozen firewood I dug out of the snow-drift behind the woodshed. It was throwing off cold cold heat when I left.

But apparently that cold heat warms up real fast.