It’s so cold tonight that the house won’t stop cracking and popping. Our bedroom’s in a corner of the house that’s far, far away from the furnace and gets pretty cold between times that the burners fire off and the blower cranks up. I don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it, but just after midnight the walls shifted with a Crack! loud enough to wake me up with a jump and send me scurrying down the stairs to make sure it wasn’t a water pipe busting wide open. It wasn’t, but that didn’t keep me from lying awake worrying about burst water pipes and everything else I imagined could go wrong with an old house being stretched to its limits by a freakish Arctic air mass. Every wall in the house is shifting enough to make a noise that sounds roughly like somebody’s pelting the outside of the house with snowballs. Icy snowballs. Maybe in another hour or so I’ll be tired enough to sleep through it until morning.