(Sorry, Erich Maria Remarque, but blog headlines are difficult to come up with.)

We spent the day under threat of a massive storm moving from Minnesota across Wisconsin, Lake Michigan, and the state of Michigan, only to see it dissipate in the North Channel. Cloudy, with a strong SE wind, presaging foul weather, but, ultimately, a false alarm. (The mural of the story is to not look at radar, (ass Ladle Rat Rotten Hut wood sigh.)

Ignoring the weather, we worked on a bit of interior trim, and some touch-up painting. And then, as the highlight of the day, went to the library, which is now on winter hours, and only open Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Saturday mornings. I had picked up volume 4 or 5 of the Shetland series (now on BBC) by Ann Cleeves) but figured I might as well start with the first volume in the series, Raven Black, only to find that the "official" librarian was long overdue on returning the volume, and I was SOL. To the rescue, of course, came Amazon, and I am now, having left the moors and ice fields of Iceland and Arnaldur Indridason, out on the moors and ice fields of the Outer Hebrides (via the iPhone and iPad). Gotta love a awful climates, however you get there.

(BTW, looking over pervious posts, it appears that I seem to have tried, but failed, to identify my previous read, Hammond Innes' The Last Voyage, a fictional recreation of Captain Cook's journal of his third expedition, this time trying to find a north-west passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the top of North America. An expedition attempted not so long ago (1776 to 1779), but back when the planet Earth was quite less known, and long before Google Earth. (Cook of, course, ended up meeting his demise in the Sandwich Islands, not in the polar ice, which, alas, has melted to the extent that there is now, actually and at long last, a possibly usable north-west passage.)

Here, the stairway to higher learning, or, more prosaically, the Billings Public Library, to which I rode by bicycle, with a stop at Fraser Beach for a walk with Pax (who arrived by alternate transportation.)