One of my Facebook friends from Texas made this pithy observation: When the temperature in Texas begins with the digit “1,” it’s supposed to have two more digits after it, not just one. The cold snap of 2010 is sweeping across the state. It was in the forties this morning but should be down to freezing by supper time and may not rise above freezing for the next 24-40 hours. Saturday should be back into the forties again. Another Texan friend suggested that I send this weather back to Canada. I said that I tried, but they sent it back because it was too wimpy.
The wind is also supposed to arrive later on this afternoon, creating a wind chill near zero degrees F in some places. Meh. I was once in Minneapolis when the mercury temperature was -40 and the wind chill was -70°.
Another empty night for television. I watched Law & Order: SVU but it felt like a rerun of an old episode, and once the witness/victim was forced to read HIV slogans from slides I just about gave up.
Didn’t get any writing work done this morning but I’ll make up for it tonight as I’ll do some editing while listening to a football game with one ear. I also hope to finish Sleepless by Charlie Huston. It’s not my favorite of his books by a long shot. One thing he’s doing that is irking the crap out of me is backloading character explication. Very late in the book, he’s putting the brakes on forward momentum to talk at great length about the backgrounds of the major characters, things we should really have known about them earlier in the book. I also find it hard to imagine Park stopping to pen these lengthy journal entries that represent his first person narration, especially since they contain information that he wouldn’t want to be caught possessing. The book makes me think about Chinatown, for some inexplicable reason. I’m hoping to get ARCs of the new Michael Slade and Joe Hill books shortly.
