Early this morning on our reconnaissance walk around the island, Gary tested the ice thickness and found that it's only 2 inches thick. That's too thin to risk walking on, so we missed the neighborhood holiday pot luck today. Darn it!

We were able to walk on the ice about 10 feet out from shore today, but again, it cracked with every step.

It's thick enough to carry foxes, though. There are fox tracks all around and criss-crossing the island, so they've been busy exploring their territory, which suddenly becomes vast as soon as the ice is about an inch thick. Yesterday morning we saw a fox running out on the ice around 7:30 a.m., crossing over to the big island. We watch for them constantly but rarely see them, just their tracks.

Before lunch today I cleaned the small guest cabin. There's no electricity in that cabin, but we have a PTO-driven generator on the back of the John Deere. So I balanced the Hoover on the forks of the front-end loader, drove the tractor to the south end of the island, and backed it up to the guest cabin door. Half an hour later, floor vacuumed, dead moths picked up, cobwebs dusted, and beds made, I was able to cross "Clean the guest cabin" off my To-Do list.


Here's what the interior of this cabin looks like. It's a one-room cabin with a sleeping loft on the second floor. We have a gas/wood cook stove and a small propane heater, but no electricity or running water in this building.

We figure we have a couple more days of being stranded on the island before we can rejoin the world. I think we'll run out of milk just as the ice becomes thick enough to walk on, so that worked out well. We've discovered that you can freeze skim milk with no ill effects. It's a little off-putting at first because it turns yellow when it's frozen (what's that all about?), but then it turns white again as it thaws.

Gary is busy installing oak window trim in our house these days -- this is my requested Christmas present and I'm happy as a clam. As for me, I've been occupied with accomplishing things on my To-Do list. The other day I installed a mosaic pattern of the Northern Lights out in the new (as yet unfinished) sauna, behind the sitting room stove:

We haven't seen many of the real Northern Lights lately, but I found a terrific website that describes and forecasts aurora borealis, at www.gedds.alaska.edu/AuroraForecast/. Apparently sunspot activity is low right now.

I'll be back tomorrow with the ice conditions.