Today seemed to breeze past. I woke four or five times in the night to put wood on the fire; the last time was likely around seven or eight in the morning when I built up the fire, went back to sleep and woke again at ten. I have no alarm clock bidding me to stand in the cold for a bus, no one waiting on me to arrive, no fear that I am missing anything by being so removed from society for a moment. Instead, I spend my day as I please and replenish wood as the fire needs it, and write and edit.
During the day strangely, I mostly edit, although if I were in 
Winnipeg I would be spending that time writing likely. Today I sailed again on the Whimsey, and canoed down the St. John River. I’d forgotten lots of details of those trips, and it further establishes that what I say about our outsourced memory is true, at least for me.
I think a journal or a diary, even the modern version of facebook’s timeline and blogs is a post-humanist way that we outsource our personality. At one remove from ourselves, we ask this technology to keep track of our scattered selves, while we allow those memories to languish and finally erode entirely. I had forgotten that ten years ago by the sea I had met people, called my friends, and worked on my novel In Light of Ray and my short stories which would become Working After the Collapse. The terrors and exhilaration of sailing across the strait of Georgia in the dark on the wings of a storm have disappeared just as surely as the large jellyfish I saw off some nameless island.
I walked to the stream again today, and the water has dropped another few inches now that the temperatures are below zero, although it is still too high for rubber booting it across. It is going to be even colder tonight so the water will drop more, although apparently there is a storm of snow and rain coming in late in the week.
I am here until Sunday, so the weather conditions mean little to me right now. The cabin is easy to keep warm in these temperatures once it warmed up completely on the first night here, and I can spend my time as leisurely as I wish. On the way back from the stream, however, so the trip would not be a waste, I picked up a piece of birch that had fallen from a tree in the recent storm and brought it to my wood pile on the sawhorse.
I also brought down the remaining carpets from the loft where I have them spread on the floor for extra insulation and softness on the feet. I am now settling into an evening of working on Blind Fish. I am hoping to get a good draft of the second book in the series done here so I can work on it when I get back.
