brrrr

The thermometer registered 12.9°F at 6:30 am when I let Bode out the back door, the coldest day of the season. It was surprisingly pleasant when we went out at noon, the sun sparkled on the fresh snow. The prints of the Vibram soles of my 1970s vintage Vasque hiking boots were still crisp from our walk late yesterday afternoon. After we were out, wished I had taken the camera along. It was starting to cloud up but the sky was beautiful.

I am wondering at what temperature the liquid crystal in the LCD display of the thermometer changes phase.

Yesterday we tried the Everyday Biscuits recipe from Two Dog Press. It was pretty much like making whole wheat bread with chicken broth for the liquid. This was the fourth recipe we tried. Bode pretty much likes anything that comes out of the oven. He is second in charge of the kitchen. He understands what hot means, and will bark to get my attention if the timer on the stove goes off when I am in another room.

I had one of those aha! moments while in class at the YMCA pool a while back. One of my classmates was telling how she knew someone who cooked a piece of chicken and veggies for her little dog every day. That would be a wonderful meal for people! What is wrong with feeding people food to dogs is that despite the abundance of good food, many people have terrible diets.

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Listening to snow

Side yard with snow on ground and falling.
This morning we had our first major snow accumulation of the season. Bode was pleased, he licked the snow outside the back door right away. I could tell because when he lifted his head, there was a bunch of it stuck to his chin, really cute.

On a whim I rented the DVD Der Große Stille which has been translated as Into Great Silence. I played it, then a couple days later played it again with everything possible turned off that could produce sound. I found it very moving, especially for starting Advent.

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Kindle

I watched the interview on Charlie Rose, then poked around on Amazon today — format is HTML. BBEdit should work just fine, I can continue to do what I have been doing for publishing to my web site for years should I decide to participate. It looks to be an exciting concept, expecially considering the number of best seller books that people read once just to keep up with things. Save trees.

In the support fora (plural of forum) for would-be authors, it appears that there is still a widespread misunderstanding about the difference between word processors (and in particular upper case W Word as in Microsoft Word) and text editors. In one of those coincidences that seem to happen more often than I would like to think, the same topic has come up in a project where several individuals are collaborating on publishing documents. I recommended that we use plain text for all communications. One person got it, with the help of another person in the group, and has been saving all their PC Word documents as RTF. Although it is a markup language, it is fairly universal and a decent compromise. Apple’s TextEdit application that comes with Mac OS X handles that file type quite nicely.

At one point I had a scheme to boost the economy — enhance productivity — by totally banning word processing software. The idea was to focus on the meaning of the words being written, rather their appearance on a page. I worked long enough in computer support to appreciate the amount of time people spend struggling with software about things that probably don’t matter.

Now to the rant part. Maybe it is because I read Fahrenheit 451 at too young an age, but to me the name kindle brings an image of burning books…

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Cold!

Allegheny River on frosty morning Hoar frost on river stones
This was the coldest morning of the season so far. It was just above 20°F at about 6:30 am. The ground was frozen and huge frost crystals grew on the snow and about anything that was off the ground through the night.

I was considering shopping for groceries this morning, but opted for a longer walk with Bode instead after I saw how hard the ice was on the car windshield. It was dead still, so the bird calls I heard only emphasized how few of them have been around for the past few weeks. I finally am able to attribute the falling two note call that has been puzzling me since we moved here to a blue jay. He was on the tree by the pole by the oxygen tank, where the mocking bird was before. He even answered back when I whistled the call to him. It is quite a lovely call, and guess it is right that even the most raucous bird should have a sweet song too.

It was slippery in places, Bode lost control and rolled onto his hip once.

As we were heading back on the trail I heard geese and saw a large V flying south.

Didn’t like to delay the shopping, but it was a nice morning to be outdoors despite the cold.

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from flurries to accumulation

Snow on front lawn
Today started out clear. I crashed pretty early last night, but got up around 5:30 this morning. It was 32°F then but dropped a couple degrees by the time it got light and I took Bode out. We got back yesterday evening just before a snow squall, fortunately the highways were dry.

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