Went to see my barber for a cut and trim over the lunch hour. Found her fighting a holding action against the failing plumbing of her room in the ground floor back of the Masonic Lodge, the second oldest building in town, next block over from my place. Seeing her wrestle with a plugged-in electric heater while standing in a puddle of water was hair-raising, to say the least. Bad weather always brings the recurrent clamour of the downtown fire companies scrambling towards one emergency or another. Between bursting pipes, overstrained heaters, and senescent wiring, Bellefonte life can be a bit more exciting than one might wish. I suppose I ought to be grateful that I only have to deal with an intermittent roof leak. My apartment is a relatively new extension on a much older building - I suspect that I'm actually younger than my dwelling, which is usually a good sign in this sort of town.

We found an actual log cabin on the back end of the hill last month. From Water Street, it looks like an intact building. I went on a trespassing expedition before the new year, to get a better look at it. It was, indeed, a log cabin, and it looks like it was in use as recently as ten or twenty years ago. The additional insulation on the inside walls makes that clear enough. Sadly, a tree of some girth apparently landed abeam of the roof at some point in the past, and crushed the cabin from gutter to beam, neatly cleaving it in two. I'm surprised it hasn't been razed.