§ Little by little each day the sunset creeps back towards 6:00pm. On Monday temperatures rose into the 20s after being in the low single digits for the past few weeks. The roads finally thawed.
§ Winter is the one opportunity I have to see all of the paths the various neighborhood animals take through my yard as they leave their imprints in the snow. Stray cats mostly meander around shoveled paths while deer trudge from point A to B in long straight lines, indifferent to the deep snow.
If I look out of my kitchen window into my backyard I can see long well-worn tracks that intersect diagonally every so often and lead all the way through to the property of the neighbor that lives directly behind me. Next door, however, the snow is almost untouched save for a few delicate bird prints.
§ My home server tinkering continues to take up more of my free time than I care to admit. This week I started messing around with Proxmox which has the biggest time-sink potential yet. An attractive nuisance if there ever was one.
§ It feels like my attention span has been increasingly frayed as winter trudges on so I’ve started reading Autumn, Knausgaard’s collection of bite-sized essays while I build up the endurance to start in on another longer book.
§ On Thursday the inevitable happened: I finally caught the seasonal cold that has been ping-ponging through all of my coworkers since early January. It has been more than half a year since the last time I got sick which is a good run, especially for me.
§ On Friday evening, in the middle of a snowstorm I suddenly saw a bright blue flash of lightning crack through the sky. For a few minutes I racked my brain trying to figure out if what I had just seen was some weird illness-induced hallucination. No, it turns out it is a real phenomenon called thundersnow—a great bad band name, by the way.
