I found some old journal entries. This one is probably circa ~2006, just titled "Scrap:" I moved to Pittsburgh at the right time in my life, but at the wrong time of year. Coming from the west coast, I was actually naive enough to be excited about the prospect of winter. I imagined nothing but snowball fights, snow angles, icicles on the eves, and that muffled crunch of loose snow under your feet. I thought I'd be doing nothing but riding sleds and watching snowflakes drift down past the street lights at night. It turns out, however, that winter doesn't quite resemble this fantasy, and that it's also the kind of thing you really want to ease into. The house we moved into didn't have working utilities, much less effective heating, and January wasn't the best time to be standing in the basement with a pipe wrench, doing my best to install gas lines without being able to feel my fingers. There were days when I literally couldn't apply the thread sealant to the black iron, because it had frozen in the tube.…