morning by starlight

It's cold this morning. It was 0.1 when I got up to feed the dogs and let them out before I went to the gym. On my way out the door, I looked at the thermometer again. It had dropped that final .1 degreee and stood at exactly 0. I put on an extra layer under my jacket and pulled my cap down tightly. When I stepped out the front door, I was not smacked by the cold. There was no wind, which makes all the diffence in the world. I won't lie; it was cold. But, it was tolerable since I was dressed for it. My main aggrevation was that I had to scrape my windshield. The frost on it stuck like glue, so I scraped and scraped without making much of a difference. I got enough off to be able to be safe and left the rest for the sun.

When it's this cold and colder, things start not working right or at all. One of the most annoying is the fan on the heater/defroster does not work when it is about zero. This is a problem when you need to go someplace and cannot see out. So I scrape on the inside of the windshield as well. The car also whines and creaks sounding like it might shatter if someone hit it. I haven been that cold. Sometimes I whine and creak, so I sympathize rather than curse.

When it is this cold in the morning, it usually means that there are no clouds holding what ambient heat there is in. When you look up in the dark predawn, the stars and planets look back at you. At 6 AM here, Venus is high in the east and one of the dippers is low in the west. The snow reflects their light and makes it possible to see quite well with out artificial light.

It sounds strange, but I like mornings like this: the light of the stars, the crunch of my steps on the snow, the feel of my warm winter jacket and most of all no wind.

Wyoming Authors

Since moving back to Wyoming, I have been reading a number of Wyoming authors. The latest of these is mystery writer Craig Johnson. I just finished his most recent book and the third in this series, Kindness Goes Unpunished. The first two are Cold Dish and Death Without Company

Johnson's hero Walt Longmire is sheriff in a thinly veiled, fictional county in north central Wyoming, that he calls Absaroka(read Big Horn)County. The other main characters are a hodgepodge of types that he is over the course of the book working at developing. Longmire's best friendHenry Standing Bear, is a Northern Cheyenne healer, his main deputy, Vic Moretti, the daughter of a family of Philadelphia cops. I think one of the reasons I enjoy reading a mystery series from the beginning is that you become better acquainted with the characters over time the way you would with real people you meet.

Johnson lives in Ucross, Wyoming which is a tiny town east of Sheridan. Its main claim to fame is th Ucrosss Foundation which is the kind of place it would be fabulous to be awarded a fellowship to spend several months writing or doing art or music.