it's a cold rainy night in the mountains of south central new mexico. winter is coming. we get significant winter in these parts so i should be preparing, doing hard preparation. i should put plastic on the screens and windows. i should get stuff inside that will be damaged by the snow. i should take down our glamping tent.

i've been fanatically consumed by my book ratings, which means that some of this stuff is going untended. even the oil in the car, i let go, because frankly i was obsessed by what came next, some writing project, and just wasn't thinking about it. the car survived though. the generator didn't. i still don't know how to fix generators.

for my book ratings i read books. simply put, i read somebody's, and rate them, and somebody reads mine and rates mine. it really helps. it gives the appearance that one's books are being read, because they are. sure, they're being read by one author at a time. but they'd be read by one person at a time anyway, so things could be much worse. as it is, i'm having some success. if any book is rated at below a million one is lucky, and at the moment i have about six below a million. now that's hustling. i stlll may be making only twenty or thirty bucks a month but i don't care. i also, in a general way, am racing against time to see if i can write what i want before it's too late.

but the winter chill sets into the valley like the fog that came with it and it's just on the edge of a freeze, maybe even a hard freeze that will make me take my hose inside and put it away for the winter. we're like a little minnesota, way up here towering over the southwest at almost 9,000 feet, and we don't have to go far to get down into the valley, the desert, where it never gets below about forty. lots of people do this, winter in the valley, but we're full-timers. we're going to make it even if we are a huge mountain ridge away from civilization. we like it out here.

i feel the wide expanse of open land, national park, reservation and rangeland, has been good for my writing, because there's no human drama, or rather, the human drama is all in one direction, back toward town. i can feel like i'm not going to be set upon, though i'm well aware there are rattlers out there, not to mention mountain lions and bears. i believe i saw a mountain lion the other day - much larger than a fox - and i liked the look he gave me - suspicious, calm, aware, ready. he wasn't afraid of my car - though he wasn't coming anywhere near it.

but, i've kind of run out of stories. i find, reading novels, that the best ones come from careful observation of the human condition, and since the pandemic, i've got no patience for the human condition or even the various fallen angels that occupy the place. i'd rather stay home. i could write forever, i just have run out of things to say.

thinking on my feet, i figure it's time to take a little break, and make the place a little more ready for winter. i've got to make stairs and a roof; these are things that will help in the winter. i'd actually like to make several roofs - a bicycle shed, a place to put things out of the snow. with the cold and wet i feel the need to close places up and make them warm and dry - to figure out how metal sheeting attaches onto roofing wood and get started.

the kids are busy with school. simply put, they never bought into this lifestyle and agreed to move way out here only on the condition that they could still have what they had in town. mostly they like internet, candy, ice cream, and fried food. but occasionally they watch a good movie or make a bowl of popcorn. that, popcorn, would be health food. their life is pretty well wrapped up in internet and electricity. and sports - they all play varying degrees of sports.

which means i do a lot of driving. all the more easy to become obsessed with ratings.