Six a.m. with a temperature of minus two and falling. When I stepped out the back door with the ash bucket, I could feel the winds beginning to swirl. It will be a brutal day for the squirrels and the chickadees.

Though I've mostly resisted lighting the woodstove until the evenings, this morning I started a fire immediately. It's not rational; the oil burner does a fine job of heating the house, and the stove is too small to do much more than heat the living room. I just crave the sight of the flames.

We still have no kitchen water, but we're managing. Book storage and closet space are conundrums. Eventually the dining room will also be the library, but we don't have enough bookshelves to start unpacking book boxes yet. In Harmony Tom had filled our bedroom-loft with built-ins, but we're seriously lacking infrastructure here. The bedroom has no real closet, so the one in my tiny study has to hold our clothes. Most of the existing closets (such as they are) don't yet have shelves in them. Several of the rooms don't have electrical updates, so we have to be careful about how we use the outlets. Except for the kitchen, the place remains an unfashionable, inconvenient little postwar house and the basement smells like grandparents. But I am so happy to be here, and so is Ruckus.

Today we'll unpack and run errands and sort and clean and do all of the regular people-who-have-just-moved stuff. I also want to do some writing, or at least some poem-copying, if I can. I've had so much editing this week that I haven't been able to snag any private time. On the bright side I did receive offers for two upcoming teaching gigs, so that was good news. Eventually I'll want to get out of the house, though for the moment I feel as if I never want to leave.