It’s amazing how warm 32° feels compared to 21°. The latter is the temperature reading on my car’s dashboard when I got to work this morning and the former is the reading when I got back from thy gym at noon. What’s the coldest temperature you’ve ever experienced? I was in Minneapolis once when it was -40° with a wind chill that made it feel like -70°. It was so cold they shut the Mall of America. People were advised to stay indoors because of how quickly flesh froze.
The newspapers warned of rolling blackouts across the state today because the power grid was overloaded by people reacting to the cold weather. Some places did lose power for up to an hour at a time, but we didn’t.
I only got 5-600 words written this morning. Floundered around for a while doing intermediate research, which took up some of the time.
Edge, the publisher of the Evolve anthologies, would like your input. They have produced two possible covers for Evolve Two and you get to have your say on which will actually be used. Go to this page and post a comment that answers the two questions in the body of the post. I’m not steering you in any particular direction by adding this one to the post today. I like ’em both.
They’re still adamant that we might get snow here in the greater Houston area this week, perhaps as early as tomorrow afternoon. Vehicles heading south on I45 from Dallas still had snow and icicles on them when they reached here yesterday afternoon. Things start looking up for us on Saturday, with a high temp in the fifties, and we’re into the sixties by Sunday.
I swear just about every actor or actress I look up these days is Canadian. The guest star on this week’s NCIS, Christina Cox, for example. I wasn’t familiar with her, though apparently I saw her before on an episode of Dexter. Apparently she’s also a stuntwoman and worked on Million Dollar Baby in that capacity. It seems like they’re recycling subplots on the show. Wasn’t Tony the victim of identity theft a season or two back? This week it was Tim who, for all his computer acumen, didn’t know that about credit card fraud protection. “When did banks get so mean?” he complained to Tony. “Oh, sometime back in the 1400s,” Tony replied. The writers wrote themselves out of a potentially sticky situation when it seemed like the gunnery sergeant had killed her abusive husband and Gibbs sympathized with her. Would he have arrested her if she’d been the culprit? We’ll never know, because they came up with a last-minute substitute perp.
I always have a jigsaw puzzle going. It’s something I do when there’s something on TV that I’m only vaguely interested in. The one I started yesterday is different from any I’ve done before. I went through the box and picked out all the edges, per usual. It didn’t occur to me until I started assembling them that I didn’t have any corner pieces. Sure, I might miss one or two, maybe even three if I was distracted, but all four? Highly unlikely. There was also a batch of small “edge” pieces that had either a single tab or a single slot, nothing else. Once I assembled the edges, I discovered that they all belonged to the top and bottom. No sides. Then I realized that four of the single-slot edge pieces fit onto the ends of the top and bottom like caps on a pipe. So, these other edge pieces get stacked up to form the right and left-hand sides, but they don’t join to each other. They’re just lined up like bricks and it takes inner pieces to join the whole thing together. Neat.
