Night gathers, and my watch begins.

With the sudden abundance of supplies liberated from your second trip into town, the weeks that follow feel like luxury. Not only are you able to increase your daily calorie intake, diversify your diet, and bolster your system with a broad range of previously lacking vitamins, but you are finally sensibly dressed for the increasingly cold weather. After a couple of days of really indulging, however, you reverted to your prior discipline of carefully managing the supplies, knowing that winter will be harsh and that next year will bring unknown challenges.

When you'd returned in the car, the undisturbed camp and message pinned to the tree had been a relief but also to some degree a disappointment. That night after dinner and before making love, you and Todd had a murmured discussion about whether finding additional friendly survivors would be a good or a bad thing. His view, that more trustworthy people would make the camp safer, provide more hands for the practical tasks of hunting and repairs, and make for a less isolated existence, narrowly succeeded in convincing you that adding more mouths to feed and increasing your footprint were acceptable risks. It's unlikely to represent a change in your plans - with the imminent winter the chances of anybody finding the camp are remote for the next several months - but it pays to be on the same page in case of such an outcome, as well as possibly informing ideas for how to proceed in the Spring.

So for now, with supplies bolstered, the camp prepared, and agreements made over policy, things settle back into your routine. The pool room becomes a storehouse for most of the bulky supplies that you don't expect to use any time soon, and Todd nails thick boards over the windows and scavenges a deadbolt from the garage to secure the door - mostly to ensure that exploratory bears don't find their way into your stores. He also has a few days of unusually successful hunting, and you get the smoker working overtime to preserve all the meat. Venison, turkey, rabbit and squirrel mean that you've got a lot to get through, but the variety is welcome and allows for some experimentation.

It was only few days after the scavenging trip into town that you woke up to find the water vessels outside with a layer of ice on the surface, and not long after that the first snowfall began. You'd been anticipating this ever since arriving at the lodge, but even though you've provisioned as well as possible, developed skills and built equipment in preparation, it was still a scary prospect. The first time it was just a few inches, settling like a fluffy blanket during a particularly windy morning that sent the little flakes spinning and creating some impressive drifts across the yard between the lodge buildings. When you first stepped out into the eerie, soft silence, the shape of everything had changed and even though by now you know the ground like the back of your hand, on the short walk to the toilet you stumbled several times over the suddenly unfamiliar topology lurking below the snow. Knowing it was only going to get more and more treacherous, you and Todd agreed that keeping paths clear was a serious priority every time a new fall came down.

Ensuring there was enough liquid water was the next challenge. It wasn't too hard to get enough to drink by melting pailfuls on top of the now always-burning stove, but keeping enough for bathing and most importantly maintaining the capacity of the toilet to dispose of waste is much more difficult. After a couple of early near misses with finding the pipes frozen, you concluded that shutting off the water supply and keeping a bucket of freshly melted snow handy to pour into the bowl was the best way.

You and Todd were already sleeping together in one of the cramped wooden bunks, owing to the nighttime chill, but with the cold intensifying it eventually dawned on him that constructing a larger bed would be a suitably manly task that would immediately earn him some very tangible benefits. On the first go he managed to cobble together something that was actually fit for purpose, using some sturdy unsplit logs from the woodshed and slats from a redundant bench in the poolroom to widen your usual cot by several feet. He then piled the mattress pads from all six cots together to create an almost-comfortable sleeping surface, one which you felt bad saying would likely be insufficient in a few months' time when pregnancy would make sleeping difficult even in a perfectly padded modern bed. Still, he did remarkably well, and you showed him your gratitude in several ways that evening.

And then, suddenly, almost with a sense of anticlimax, there's nothing left to do but actually live through it. A couple of relatively light snowfalls pass and thaw, but the first real blizzard comes in early December, and as layer after layer of white shrinks your world down to the cabin and little else, it's time to put all of your preparations to the real test.