Tuesday, December 27, 2011

I Love a Rainy Night

Really, I do -- and I went to sleep last night intending for this to be a post about how very, very nice it is to fall asleep outside (but warm and dry) to the pitter-patter of raindrops on the tent.

Then, about 4 in the morning, I startled awake with a sense that the tent had suddenly become smaller ... and it had. The walls were sagging inward. The pitter-patter of rain had changed to a slightly different sound, a cousin of the sound a gourd rattle makes, solid fragments hitting solid surfaces.

SNOW! Huzzah!

I shook the tent some to get the stuff off its surfaces so that it could return to something like normal shape, then unzipped the door and just watched the pretty stuff come down for a bit, before going back to sleep for a couple more hours. Sweet.

When I finally got up and about later, I discovered that the main tent-mis-shaping culprit was accumulation at the base of my tarp lean-to on the north side of the tent. It was getting its share of the snowfall, plus everything that landed on the tarp and slid down, plus some from a small tree overhanging the area. The weight of all this had caused my X-shaped tent-poles to shift position, creating most of inward bow in the tent wall. I probably need to re-engineer that whole mess before we get a more significant snowfall.

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