Enough of political comments. I’m not really into politics at all, but sometimes there are things that irk me and I need to get it off my chest.
It’s cold outside today…still. Minus 34 Celsius and minus 43 windshield factor. That is damn cold. The same is forecast for tomorrow. Sometimes I wonder if I’m living on a hostile alien planet. How Humans survived in this type of environment is sometimes hard to grasp. Sure, now we live in houses heated in the winter and air-conditioned in the summer, but our ancestors didn’t. The aborigines on the North American continent lived in tents. In the summer they were plagued by mosquitoes and in the winter they had to deal with the extreme cold. The smoke from the fire in the middle of the tent couldn’t have been very pleasant.
We get our streets plowed by huge machines so we can drive in our heated cars, warm and cozy. Those natives had to stomp through high snow. They had no roads. They had no chainsaws or even other saws to get firewood, no augers to drill a hole through the ice to fish or to get drinking water.
What a hard life it must have been!
Of course, it wasn’t any different thousands of years ago in Europe or in the rest of the world. Just think about the primitive people with their weapons made from bones or stones, hiding from lions, tigers and other carnivores hunting for food. And Humans were considered food animals.
Those times fascinate me and I like to write stories about it, set on other planets where I can add my own unique dangers and challenges the people face. That is fine in stories, but actually living in those conditions is not for me. I enjoy going hunting in the fall when I spent a few days in the bush with friends. We hunt deer, walk around in the bush or sit on stands waiting for the deer to come by. It is cold sometimes. At other times it rains. It can be miserable. But we enjoy it. Don’t ask why. We sleep in a trailer or in a van.
After a week of that I am ready to go home to a warm house and a comfortable bed.
There is only so much I can stand of primitive living. Actually, compared to how the primitive people lived, those days in the bush are still quite civilized.
Talk about living in a warm place brings up another matter. There are other critters out there who also seek warm places for the winter. I’ve been busy catching them for the last week. I’m talking about rodents, mice actually. I made the mistake of leaving a bag of birdseeds standing on the floor in my garage. When I noticed holes in the plastic and seeds spilling out of the bag, I knew I had uninvited guests. They even tried to take up residency under the hood of my car. That called for extreme measures.
I bought a couple of mousetraps, baited them with peanut butter in the beginning, but now I’m using small pieces of cheese. So far I’ve caught 16 mice. They are living (sorry, were living) in the wood I have stacked up for my wood stove. It makes for perfect living conditions…for mice. I had no idea there were so many. At first I thought I had only one mouse. How naive can you be? It probably started with one. That one called all its relatives and now I have a tribe. I hope I’ll be catching the last one soon. I always worry they might decide to look for refuge inside the house. Can’t have that.
I’ve been busy with more writing on my novel ‘Epsilon’. 19 Chapters and around 57,000 words so far, but much more to go.
Orola, Warrior Priestess, should be available from MSFiction tomorrow. Finally.
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