The Winter of My Discontent
I just went the entire month of January without ever seeing even a bit of my lawn. I can't ever recall having snow on the ground for an entire month. Coastal Rhody gets snow storms in winter, sure, and even an occasional blizzard, but the snow cover never lasts more than a couple of weeks. The temperature creeps up over freezing for a few days, there's some rain, and presto... The lawn reappears in all it brown and muddy glory. Not this year. I never thought I'd be happy to see February.
Yesterday we finally got a little respite as temps made it up into the mid-forties. I even considered going for a ride, but then it occurred to me that the bike path would likely be a river of melted snow. If it had been plowed in the first place. Instead, I replaced the broken third door handle on the truck with a much-better-than-the-cheap-plastic-original machined aluminum handle. That oughta last. I've been thinking about mailing the broken handle to the chairman of GM with a brief note as an object lesson as to why his company is on the verge of bankruptcy.
After that, I headed down to the basement to work on the stop block system for the radial arm saw, and accomplished quite a bit. I've been trying to get some stuff done down there all month, but it was just too damn cold. Saturday, the temperature down there was in the high forties. It's amazing how much warmer 55° feels to the fingers.
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Other than that, I've mostly been parked in front of the computer playing Baseball Mogul. For the first time ever, in any game, I simmed a team for an entire season, managing all 162 games, plus the playoffs and World Series. I started just before Christmas, and finished last weekend. Now I'm about two thirds of the way through the following season, although I'm only managing about one game a series, and letting the computer sim the rest. I have some quibbles with the game, but it is fast.
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I haven't ridden my bike since December 14th, the longest I've gone without riding in almost two years. It's not that I haven't wanted to. There's only been one day in all that time when it was above freezing without a lot of snow on the ground and I wasn't at work, and that was Christmas morning. I almost did then, but I would've been late for dinner. I assumed there'd be other days. Last year I managed to ride 50 miles in January. This year, nada. Feh.
Yesterday we finally got a little respite as temps made it up into the mid-forties. I even considered going for a ride, but then it occurred to me that the bike path would likely be a river of melted snow. If it had been plowed in the first place. Instead, I replaced the broken third door handle on the truck with a much-better-than-the-cheap-plastic-original machined aluminum handle. That oughta last. I've been thinking about mailing the broken handle to the chairman of GM with a brief note as an object lesson as to why his company is on the verge of bankruptcy.
After that, I headed down to the basement to work on the stop block system for the radial arm saw, and accomplished quite a bit. I've been trying to get some stuff done down there all month, but it was just too damn cold. Saturday, the temperature down there was in the high forties. It's amazing how much warmer 55° feels to the fingers.
---
Other than that, I've mostly been parked in front of the computer playing Baseball Mogul. For the first time ever, in any game, I simmed a team for an entire season, managing all 162 games, plus the playoffs and World Series. I started just before Christmas, and finished last weekend. Now I'm about two thirds of the way through the following season, although I'm only managing about one game a series, and letting the computer sim the rest. I have some quibbles with the game, but it is fast.
---
I haven't ridden my bike since December 14th, the longest I've gone without riding in almost two years. It's not that I haven't wanted to. There's only been one day in all that time when it was above freezing without a lot of snow on the ground and I wasn't at work, and that was Christmas morning. I almost did then, but I would've been late for dinner. I assumed there'd be other days. Last year I managed to ride 50 miles in January. This year, nada. Feh.