Storms and stress

Sometimes homesteading is just frustrating, surprising, grinding work.  A week of nearly continuous snow spurred on our most recent bouts, as ice suffused the land and drained our muscles:

• Snowshoeing up to repower the broadband transmitter in the dark was the hardest yet.  The snowpack had reformed, erasing our hard-won trail.  Then several days' worth of weather froze the top layer, added more on top of that, then froze the newest stratum.  A 30 minute tromp became a 2 hour saga of seemingly endless baby steps.  Each snowshoe-step forward required a forceful near-kick downwards to punch out something to stand on.  Each step had to abut the previous one, and each show not catch the other.
• Broadband has stuttered, thanks to multiple coverings of snow-ice-snow on multiple antenna.  (This ain't part of the always-on broadband concept)
• And our car got stuck, again, at the end of the driveway, in a mix of spinning wheels, slick surfaces, and constricting snowbanks.  It took a while to free ourselves, with Owain hauling buckets of ashes (stored in the basement, from our wood-burning stove); me digging around each tire, then hacking back a snowbank; Gwynneth howling about being late for school; Ceredwyn using her fine driving skills to twitch the Saturn back and forth, sideways, and eventually out onto... a very slick, snow-covered road.

All of these pains are immersed in wintry beauty, every step of the way.  We knew about these things when we got into homesteading.  But here I want to pause to... sit a spell, rest my back, and acknowledge the drang that comes with the sturm.