No Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons where y’all are? I get those guys in clusters every couple of years.
Oh hell yeah. The warm weather here grows them like ant colonies.
I heard from a really reliable source once that everybody’s a little bit racist.
Thankfully I’ve never had to endure this, due to the aforementioned stuff (difficult to get to my doors, regardless of where I’ve lived), which is a real blessing. Hah. I made a funny.
No matter how remote your adobes are, someone is gonna show up and knock on the door sooner or later.
The wife is away for the week visiting family in Seattle.
Quick fact: Sting got his name from a black and yellow striped shirt he used to wear at the band’s beginning.
I spent some time this winter doing Science™, in effect to determine how much it would cost us to turn the thermostat up a degree or two. A graph happened.
(The answer is that going from 68 to 70 in an average winter month runs about $7.)
Nothing to do with anxiety or depression but I don’t answer the phone at home unless I recognize the number. Your bothering me doesn’t mean I have to answer your phone call.
The best thing that ever happened at my office was when a power outage required us to re-set our phones. Suddenly I could see the callers phone number. Even at the office I don’t answer any number that comes from Timbuktoo or is from an insurance or google company.
More than I would have thought.
Unrelated, but could someone please explain to me in plain English WTF is a “heating degree day”?
I hear this on the radio with the weather reports all the time, and it drives me nuts. There’ll be a report of “So far this year, there have been 512 heating degree days.” How is that possible? I even looked it up once, but it didn’t help. Too complicated. Which makes me wonder why they bother reporting it.
See, throwing the word “day” in there just messes with peoples’ minds.
It’s a very poorly-named unit. One heating degree is outside air temperature one degree below some set number (usually 65F, I think?). A measurement in heating degrees is just a temperature measurement. If there are 30 heating degrees, it’s 35F.
One heating degree-day is 24 hours during which the average temperature in heating degrees is 1 (or the average temperature in Fahrenheit is 64). If there are 30 heating degree-days on a given day, the average temperature on that day is 35F.
It’s useful because it counts up as temperatures go down, and its zero point is at the temperature above which heating is not required. If a month has 8100 Kelvin-days, in a sense, I know how much work it would take to cool something to roughly absolute zero for that month. If the same month has 1160 heating degree-days, I know how much work it takes to heat my house to roughly livable temperatures.
That was helpful. Thank you.
About time.
I just learned a new word from a 1967 Playboy I found in Mafia 3.
Peripatetic:
Traveling from place to place, especially working or based in various places for relatively short periods.
Huh. Guess some people really do get them for the articles.
I just noticed for the first time that about 1% of hits to my website are from the Soviet Union.
It’s the time of year when people start turning on ACs. Is it just me or do electronics seem to act up more often? I suspect it’s power spikes.
On my walk into the office just now I came across a blackbird pecking over a dead rat. Sometimes nature is just nasty.
I was listening to Crowded House’s song “Weather With You” on the way into work this morning and noticed something I had never picked up on before. Here’s the opening verse:
Walking 'round the room singing Stormy Weather
At 57 Mt. Pleasant St.
Now it’s the same room but everything’s different
You can fight the sleep but not the dream
Things ain’t cooking in my kitchen
Strange affliction wash over me
Julius Caesar and the Roman Empire
Couldn’t conquer the blue sky
Anything seem unusual about that? Well I only noticed for the first time that the lyrics don’t rhyme. That seems unusual, but I wonder if there are other songs out there that don’t rhyme and I just never noticed? I need to start paying attention.
I think you would be surprised (maybe not) how many songs have lyrics that don’t always rhyme. Personally I tend to ignore lyrics but I am listening to a lot of music at work now (via an MP3 player and ear phones) and for whatever reason I hear the lyrics better. For many song writers close is good enough.
I don’t think they were even trying to come close though. You could say that “street/dream” are in the ball park, but that’s about it. I remember being a little blown away as a teenager upon finding that a lot of Shakespeare’s sonnets don’t rhyme, and that just isn’t a thing all poems do. Maybe I’ve made an incorrect assumption with songs too.