The eye of the storm is quiet... maybe too quiet.

Sunday evening. Six thirty. Fed. Tidy kitchen. Very tidy house for reasons that are not good.

If this was the spring or summer I would be outside pottering around, but it's the winter so it's dark and cold and I am stuck inside with four hours to kill before I can go to bed with the only book in the house I haven't read which is a Patrick White, which is of course depressing the hell out of me. Which only a Patrick White novel can do.

Did he have a terrible mother?

All his novels (well not so much The Tree of Man, which is great) are about beastly women who struggle against the boredom of 1950s Sydney/ some beautiful-sounding outback station. Their children hate them. Their husbands are gauche hillbillies who get most of the sympathy.

And they take forever to die.

The current one is The Eye of the Storm. I'm not complaining about the writing, mind. it's beautiful...

... I just don't understand his obsession with the subject matter.

I'm reading an online essay about him now... apparently I am looking at the book through the wrong end of the analytical telescope... it's about Elizabeth Hunter reconciling living and dying and trying to find that 'eye of the storm', inner peace and a touch of the divine.

I had decided that the eye of the storm was the peace her family had at the beginning of the end... as in when you get to the eye of the storm, even though there is the rest of the storm to get through, it's usually not as bad as the first bit...

No wonder I didn't get a first in college!

As well as not being able to 'see', I cannot see right now, because Shannon ate my glasses the other morning.

Despite having searched the house (and tidied it on the way and having found lots of things I thought I had lost forever, including a 'congratulations on your engagement' card I should have mailed in September) I cannot find my old glasses so I am blind for the foreseeable.

I have to wait till January to get a new pair on the health insurance... major pain in the ass.

Why on earth would a dog eat a pair of glasses?

We have managed to spend another weekend without setting foot in a mall, which is one of the things I try to do coming up to Christmas, and we got our new water system installed, the dog spayed, and quite a few odds and ends done, so we are feeling pretty good about things.

And my online campaign against the crapness of the company that we bought Little 'Un's present from seems to have worked because they emailed us today and said they were express shipping it to us in time for Christmas.

So thanks to them for that.

While I was outside trying to find chores to do to get some of the sunshine into me, Himself spent some of the afternoon looking at land online.

The reason he did this (I think) is because when we checked MLS the other day to see the sale price of the house next door (which is for sale again), we noticed that an acre of swampy land down the road by the lake was for sale (for $180,000, FFS!). Then we noticed that a beautiful swathe of land by the seashore, that we walk on regularly is for sale (for $600,000 FFS!!) and that got us thinking and talking about how ludicrous the price of land is around here.

So today, Himself started looking at land in other parts of the province, and found 100 acres in Victoria County, Cape Breton, for $29,000.

Remote woodland now, not Cabot Trail picturesque.

But still.

Good price.

I hope he doesn't want it for Christmas!

I'm kinda broke right now.

But he reckons this will be the land for the compound.

Those of you who know us know about the compound.

The compound started out as a game, round about the time I read Cormac MacCarthy's The Road, which scared the bejaysus out of me.

The compound was an ongoing project we discussed while having a beer in the yard in the summer. The compound is where we'll go when the world starts to go pear-shaped.

We'd need some land. Build an off-grid housing complex. Invite some friends to come along if things ever got tough for them/ they could get there.

Some of our Irish friends got to thinking about solar-powered sailing ships... to get to the compound (although they'd probably end up sailing around a lot).

It got popular, so we decided that everyone had to have a skill.

People got really into this... we had beekeepers, librarians, flax-spinners, (hunters, gatherers, gardeners, cooks, etc).

What would we put there?

Fuel, food, weapons (yes dear).

You can while away a number of hours quite pleasantly talking about the compound.

In the summer.

When everything's good in the world.

When the winter comes, Himself gets bored and starts scouting for land.

At least this year, it's Cape Breton.

Last year, it was Northern New Brunswick.

Anyways, applications for residency at the compound if the times get too bad can be submitted to us on the back of a renewable energy source diagrammatic.

Just mail it to Eagle.

We're looking for engineers.

Specifically electrical engineers.

And, yes, I'm still in charge.

Somebody has to be and it was my idea.

That's why.

Apart from issues regarding perimeter security, of course.

And so the winter begins... a long, long drawn-out effort to not get too bored in the evening and end up gnawing my own arm off for something to do.

I need a hobby.

Any suggestions?

Nothing too expensive, I'm really broke right now.

And knitting I think is beyond me.

And nothing chewable of course.

For obvious reasons.