Ethan's Vivifying Adventures

Well, March has been leonine throughout this year. The only aspect that was reasonably lamb-like was the fluffy white snow we got a bunch of over the weekend. It was strange dealing with such wet snow. I'm thoroughly used to the sounds-like-Styrofoam-when-you-walk-on-it, dry, dense variety one finds on the Antarctic Plateau. Anyhow, the melting process has been facilitated by the big winds that started back up last night. Three cheers for convective heat transfer! Delta-q! Delta-q! Delta-q!

I still have nothing decisive to report about my search for "what's next". In the last week there have been some doors that have closed, but others remain open. I think I have done right by myself, given the breadth and scope of inquiry I have made over the last 9 months I have been looking. In the meantime, I have started sorting through the boxes of my junk stored out in the barn, just so I can get rid of superfluous stuff I do not particularly need to hold on to. As Mr. Durden said, "The things you own end up owning you. " Whether I end up moving or keeping it in storage, it is always nice to downsize that anchor of stuff I drag around.

I recently finished reading a Robert Heinlein book titled "Tunnel in the Sky". It has to do with people adapting to a new environment into which nuclear-powered space-time portals thrust them. The themes of the end of the book were really similar to what a lot of folks felt when South Pole opened back up for summer. I won't spoil the denouement, but you should check out that little read sometime if you are at all interested in the psychological experience of living in isolation like we do/did at the bottom of the world.

“No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match."
~Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands