dealing with the cold in a new way

background sounds: "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," NPR news/comedy show

It's been bloody cold for the last few days, even here in Tallahassee. It got down to 19 degrees Fahrenheit at my house a couple days ago.

The house I rent has no insulation in the roof; in the closets, you can see the roof itself, and even the asphalt sheeting between some of the boards. I've managed to stay warm, though, by putting up curtains over the blinds. The windows are single-pane glass. My washing machine is outside, in a 3-sided enclosure under the carport and attached to the house; the cold-water pipe for the washer runs along the ground for about 15 feet but comes up at both ends by over a foot. I was concerned about the pipe freezing, obviously, so I hooked up a water hose to the outlet at the washer end and let it trickle overnight. The hose ended up containing a lot of ice by morning, but the pipe didn't freeze, and the trickle was still flowing.

I never had to do that kind of thing when I lived around the Great Lakes, even though the winters there are oh-so-much colder. Up there, nobody is crazy enough to run exposed copper pipes outdoors.

On another tack, Tom Ridge was sworn in yesterday as head of the Department of Homeland Security. I see that he had a new slicked-back hairstyle, a la Goebbels. Ironic.

Now that the DHS is officially in gear, I guess we should all be more careful about what legitimate reseach we pursue, since at any time we could be hauled in and held without charges based on some gub'mint spook's nosing about in our (formerly somewhat private) activities.

Or, maybe we should go nosing about in suspicious areas we never would have otherwise, just to set them off.