09:58 – I suppose that 2015 was a good year for some people, but for most it’s been a year best forgotten. I’d like to think that 2016 will be a better year, but I’m afraid it will end up being more of the same, if not worse. I’ve often said that I expect a slow slide into dystopia, and that appears to be what’s happening now.
For us, 2015 has been an okay year. Business has been noticeably slower than 2014 and even 2013 before it, but we’ve purchased a new house in a rural area and relocated there. We’ll spend 2016 getting settled in, making new friends, getting the old house ready to go on the market, and working on building the business. I don’t really expect any catastrophic trigger event to occur in 2016, but if things do get bad quickly, we’ll be as ready for it as we can be.
Over the last few days, we’ve been hearing gunshots nearby. Hundreds of them, and they seem to be coming from within a few hundred yards of our house. The reports sound like shotgun or heavy-caliber pistol fire rather than rifle fire. I wondered if there was a sporting clays range somewhere out behind our house, so yesterday Barbara and I drove around the back roads to see if we could figure out what was going on. We didn’t spot a range among all the fields and pastures, so we decided it might just be someone on the farm behind us shooting clays. Colin is taking it surprisingly well. Ordinarily, anything that sounds like thunder or gunshots sends him fleeing in terror, but he’s pretty much ignoring these sounds.
Jen and her group are doing another trial run starting today and running through Sunday evening to follow up on the one they did over the Thanksgiving weekend. They had warm weather for the first one, but for this one they’ll have highs not much above freezing and lows well down in the 20’s. They’ll be using their wood stove exclusively to keep warm and for cooking, which should make for an interesting weekend.
Back to work on the unfinished area of the basement.