After dinner I like to brush my teeth. Getting around the problem of frozen toothpaste is easy. You just pop it into a pot of hot water for a few minutes. I put my toothbrush in there, too. Sometimes it's a little lump of ice, if it didn't dry before the cabin froze last time.
Dish soap is thawed the same way.
In a tent, the dish rag remains perpetually frozen and I thaw it in hot water before doing dishes. By morning the cabin logs are warmer, although the water buckets may be half frozen and the slop bucket of gray water in the corner might need thawing out before I can dump it. I'm hitching the dogs and heading out to the next cold cabin to do it all over again. I hope Miki left dinner on the table there too. Julie Collins is a free-lance writer who lives at Lake Minchumina.