Day 4073

The storm of the century continues. It was a little warmer today, but still well below freezing. We got more snow overnight and nothing is melting. I think just about everyone has had enough of this. The power company is still unable to say when power will be fully restored and if you lose power, you are out of luck. When the electricity goes out, your house cools rapidly, greatly increasing the danger of burst pipes. I had a Zoom call scheduled this afternoon and it was abruptly canceled when one of the participants learned that a pipe had just broken in his home. This is what everyone dreads. Broken pipes, flooded homes, and not a plumber in sight. Now that everyone had learned to put their faucets on drip, some municipalities are telling residents not to do this because it is causing dangerously low water pressure levels. Warmer weather can't come soon enough.

When Janet and I went walking today, we couldn't believe some of the things we saw. There was a guy using an ATV to pull a kid on a sled around on city streets. I cringed just looking at this. If a car was to start sliding toward them, it would be very hard for the sled to get out of the way. When we arrived at the lake we saw several people attempting to walk on the ice. On person was way out on the edge of the ice where it met the remaining open water. Didn't this guy know that the lake ice was still very thin? If he fell through the ice, he would probably freeze before the fire and rescue folks could get to him. Of course there were plenty of cars driving too fast on the frozen roads. The cold weather definitely isn't making people smarter.

We still have power, which is kind of amazing since our electricity is usually the first to go when a bad storm hits us. I think power is slowly being restored in the city, but there are still a lot of people in the dark. I see tons of posts on Facebook from folks who have been without electricity for hours or even days. Things are even worse for my friends out at McDonald Observatory. They have been stranded up on the mountain without electricity for days and fuel for the emergency generators is running low. It's hard to believe that an entire state has been crippled by this storm. Hurricanes and tornadoes are bad, but they are very localized. This is the entire state.

There is still conflicting information on almost everything. AAA says to start your car for a short time and then immediately turn it off again. Others say to bring. the engine up to normal operating temperatures before turning it off. Janet is doing the former and I'm doing the latter. Neither of us knows who's right. I'm just glad the cars still start. I'm definitely going to have to add some air to my tires before I go anywhere. All four are very low.

When the snow first arrived, Dawn would race around the yard for a while after she went outside to pee. Now she does her business as fast as she can and immediately heads for the back door. Dawn is a smart dog and I think the novelty of snow wore off very quickly. Several of the neighborhood dogs seem to love the snow, but these all seem to be Huskies or Labs with thick heavy coats. I'm not surprised that Dawn gets cold quickly. So do I.

We have one more day of sub-freezing weather before things start to thaw. Late next week the temperature is supposed to be in the sixties again. Warmer weather can't come soon enough when you are faced with the possibility of a power outage or broken plumbing pipe at any moment. I"m wondering if we'll have to reschedule our second dose of the vaccine. They say the vaccination process is a mess now, since most vaccination sites have been closed all week. We'll see what happens. I'm sure February still has a few surprises for us.

Lexi is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day

Day 420

Learning something new can often be slow and tedious. For me, tackling something I don't really understand usually involves searching fourteen different variations of "why won't this work?" on Google and seeing if I can glean anything useful from the poor fools who tried to learn the same thing ahead of me. Today I did a test run of my new WiFi photo transfer system and learned that it is basically useless. The WiFi card actually works fine and transfers files flawlessly to a nearby computer. The unexpected problem is that it is so darn slow that you could never use it in an environment where you are taking hundreds of images an hour. I guess I could have learned this ahead of time by reading all the discussions about this subject floating around on photography forums and user groups. That's not the way guys do things though. We typically buy something first and then figure out through trial and error if it is a piece of junk. At least I didn't destroy my camera. About thirty minutes after I put the card in the camera and started shooting, I found a long list of cameras on the Eye-Fi website, along with a warning that your camera could be ruined if you tried to insert the card. Luckily, my camera wasn't on the list.

I remembered today that I'd accidentally let one of my domain names expire. I wish I'd remembered this two months ago when it actually did expire. This was a domain that I had thought would be valuable to me at some point. Apparently, it's not all that valuable. Two and a half months after I let the domain expire, it was still available. Nobody wanted it. Chagrined, but unbeaten, I renewed the domain and made a mental note to keep better track of these things in the future.

It's supposed to start snowing again tonight sometime after midnight. I don't hate snow or anything, but all I can think about at the moment is that all the time and energy I spent cleaning the ice off the roof recently has totally gone to waste. If we get freezing rain followed by snow, as they're predicting, I'm going to be up on the roof later this week doing the whole cleanup process all over again.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day