The Wicked Wind of the East

The horrible warm wind coming in from Canada that so plagued my life in the early days of hermitage has returned, and it is blow/melting all the wind off the trees, and I am losing hope. The temperature got above freezing, and it was cloudy all day. Obviously, they don't have weather forecasts for where I am, but the do for Chitina, 35 miles west, and McCarthy, 25 miles east. It was 10 degrees in Chitina all day and 5 degrees in McCarthy. What is going on here? It appears that my father has found the ONLY piece of land in the entirety of interior Alaska that can't stay below 32 degrees in the wintertime. I have spent most of the day running around yelling incoherently at the trees and trying to hit the wind with a sledgehammer. Skylar started moaning about melting away into nothingness, so I started screeching obscenities at him every couple minutes to keep him quiet. The overall damage isn't bad, it only got above freezing for an hour or so, and we are safely back down in the safe zone right now, but the snow which had been laid out smooth and clean like fresh tin foil is now all pocked and disfigured by all the crap getting blown off the trees.

Other than the disastrous weather developments today was pretty smooth sailing. I did a bunch of cleaning up around the place. Sancho and I did escape for a ski into the valley to the south, but the day was dreary and gray, and I couldn't get the energy going. I just shuffled along without conviction for several miles and called it a day. Sancho found the majority of a rabbit carcass, so he didn't mind one bit. I didn't even take any pictures because there was no light. Everything was the same color. Blech. In order to raise morale, I have decided to add some pictures of Sancho at his finest: when he is frolicking with a large stick.