Thursday This n That

That's right, it's Thursday... Derp.

It's freakin' COLD here.  Last time I checked it was -5.  Negative five.  37 degrees below freezing.  Blerg.

The wren in our garage is fat and happy and warm.  I've named him Woodstock.  He's not yellow, but he is a funny little bird.  We're leaving suet nuggets on top of the Jeep for him.  And there's a shallow pan with water.  And, of course, the space heater is keeping it above 40F in there.  (So the pipes don't freeze, not for him, but he gets the benefit of it.)

The news coming out of Israel is pissing me off royally.  If you support Hamas or the P'stinians, please stop coming by here.  I stand with the Jews.  How any person can stand alongside the people who are celebrating the murders of babies escapes me.  It must be some kind of insanity.

Anyway...

I got my first page of edit notes for this round done and entered into the manuscript.  This is the phase where I do that... make a page of notes, enter the notes, lather-rinse-repeat throughout the day.  One page of notes = 3 pages of manuscript.  I hope to make more progress today.  Might as well, I can't go outside or anything.

Last night, we sat down to watch a new series.  I had great hopes for it, but the series opener was unimpressive.  It had a couple spots that made me LOL, but not enough to sustain my interest.  :shrug:  Hubs and I looked at each other and said 'well, we did that'.  For those interested, it was Good Cop / Bad Cop.  Your mileage may vary, but it's not for us.  Still loving High Potential, but the season ender was last week, so we'll have to wait to see how they resolve the mystery next season.  

I made awesome soup the other day.  I'm calling it Chicken-Cheddar-Bacon-Potato Chowder.  I had defrosted a chicken breast and it's cold, so I got the idea for soup, did some recipe scanning, and then just starting throwing things in the pot.  Like I said, it was awesome.  We'll be having leftovers of it tonight for dinner.  Yum.

Speaking of food, now I'm hungry.  Have a great day.  Stay warm.  Eat something yummy.

Thursday This n That

I know there have been a lot of random posts lately.  Here's another one.

I've been spending a lot of my limited online time blocking morons on social media.  There's this one on FB who uses some variant of Ellen Degenerate to keep making new profiles because so many people are blocking and/or reporting them.  Feh.  My FB block list has to be  huge.  ROFL

There seems to be a huge amount of stupidity in the world these days.  If only there were a cure... Oh, wait, there is.  Knowledge.  It's readily accessible and has no side effects.  You can even operate machinery after taking it.  ;o)

I need to go grocery shopping.  I don't want to.  But it either has to be today or tomorrow because we're down to our last can of cat food.  The Boyz will be testy if they don't get their daily can for lunch.  (They split a can.)  Anyway, it's cold and I'm unmotivated.

It's too damn cold to be outside without a jacket.  Then again, at least it's not as cold as Michigan.

Finn's so funny.  He knocked his bed off the table where it sits and it fell upside down over the heat vent.  So he was laying on the bottom of it, enjoying the heat.  I moved it off the register and he didn't want to lay on it anymore.  After he walked into the bedroom, I moved the bed back onto the table and he came running across the house, bounced up onto the table, and right into the bed.  Of course, he didn't stay there because he's got the zoomies.  Silly kitty.

Okay, Hubs is trying to get online, so it's time for me to get off.  Someone's supposed to come help us with the Starlink this afternoon.  Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Randomosity

Forgetting to blog + super-slow internet which makes blogging a pain in the ass = a dearth of posts.  

Sawyer is finally on his way to becoming a lap cat.  Sometimes this is a good thing.  Sometimes it's not so much.  He's a moose, for one thing.  For another, when he decides he's done being a lap cat, he doesn't just get down.  He rolls over and wants to play rough (i.e. he bites).  Be careful what you wish for.

This morning, I saw a video of a chick saying how happy she was to be 42 and able to go to a bar on Thanksgiving without having to worry about getting a babysitter. She finished with some nonsense about the right hating that.  Trust me, honey.  The right loves the fact that you aren't breeding.  The same thing goes for all the women who have declared their celibacy in the face of T winning.  More power to ya, gals.  Oh, and the same goes for all the people who are declaring their intent to leave the country.  Buh-bye.  :waves:

It's freakin' cold.  Sure, it's December, but I'm still not ready for freakin' cold.  

Once again, I missed fall fishing.  It was too hot to fish, then it rained a bunch, now it's too cold.  

I need to start working on Christmas cards.  And put up the tree.  And find gifts for the moms.  I'm so not ready for Christmas. I say we put it off until February.

If you're looking for something yummy and easy to make for the holidays, go to Silver's blog for today.

There's some kind of big bird in our woods that I can't identify.  I've only seen glimpses of it as it flies away.  What I have seen is gray.  And big.  Did I mention big?  About redtail size or larger.  It could be an owl, but those are darker.  It might be a goshawk, but those aren't supposed to be this far south.  I'll keep watching and try to get a better look at it.  Right now, though, it's just a ghost.

And that's it for me today.  Time to call Mom.  Have a great day wherever you are.  :hugs:

Yeah, I'm Still Alive

 I forgot to post yesterday.  No real reason.  Maybe my brain was too wrapped up in this weather crap.  :shrug:

Speaking of which it's negative 9 outside right now.  Nine below zero...  41 below freezing. :shudder:  And it's just under 64F in the office.  The furnace - which isn't really a furnace, it's a heat pump - is having trouble getting the house up to it's usual 68F.  Plus it's always colder in the office.  But the thing is running and as long as it's running, life is good.  The two space heaters in the garage are keeping the areas where there are pipes at 40F.  Anything above freezing is bonus.  I do not want to see the electric bill for next month.

Having a bathroom in the garage is kind of a pain in the ass.  I mean, it's good for washing yucky things in the sink out there rather than in the nice bathrooms, but I don't think either of us have used the toilet in there in 8 years.  If there were no bathroom out there, we wouldn't give a rat's furry, white hiney how cold it was out there.  

We got about four and a half inches of snow from the first round of snow dumpage.  It's supposed to start snowing again tonight.  Maybe an inch or two more from that.  Blerg.

From a FB page I follow about local weather, I got a link to a site that tracks power outages.  We haven't lost power at all.  I saw someone on FB talking about potential rolling blackouts in the area due to shortages of natural gas (due to the NG wells freezing), and a neighbor stopped yesterday to tell Hubs he heard our power company might be considering doing that, too.  Fingers crossed they don't actually have to do it.  I mean, it would only be for 30-60 minutes at a time, but blerg.

One upside to all this is that I've been making yummy things to eat.  For instance, yesterday I made frittatas for breakfast and then stew for dinner and also coffee cake.  Sunday, I made a vat of spaghetti with a side of garlic bread.  Saturday I made chili and cornbread.  I now have a freezer full of leftovers and Hubs will have to roll me out of here when this is over.

In other news, the weather is making people cranky.  I watched people basically yelling at each other in several threads on the area road conditions.  Dudes, chill.  Yeah, people are asking the same questions over and over without reading the other threads where the questions might be answered.  Yeah, it's pretty logical to think if road X and road Z are crappy, so is road Y.  But for the most part these days, logic has flown the coop.  More so when people are concerned about their safety and their needs.  They're hoping against hope that THEIR ROAD will be okay because they need to get to work or to go buy milk and bread and baby formula.  While their asking might be annoying, it's not really hurting anyone.  Sheesh.

On a lighter note, I saw someone made a meme that shows a snowy road.  In answer to the question 'how are the roads?', it has a dialogue bubble popping up from the road itself saying "I'm fine. Thanks for asking:.  Humor is the key, man.  I saw another one that showed a snowy, steep road and said something like 'Texas Driving Tip: Stay Home.  Y'all aren't conditioned for this.'  It made me LOL because my brother in OK messaged me yesterday with something along those lines.  We're Michiganders, folks.  The pictures I'm seeing of the 'bad roads' are pretty tame compared to what I used to drive through on a regular basis.  It's all relative.  I saw another meme that said something about 'don't laugh at southerners for not being able to cope with the cold and snow, we don't laugh at you northerners when it gets hot up there'.  Umm, yeah, you do.  And you should.  Share the laughs.  Sometimes laughing is all you've got to keep from crying.

Know what I mean?

What are you finding to laugh about today?

One last thing that I hope makes you smile.  Through all this snow and frigid temps, we have sparrows singing their little hearts out.  They're all round like feathery tennis balls right now, but they're finding something to sing about.  Maybe they're just happy we're leaving them loads of sunflower seeds so they have stuff to eat without having to scratch through the snow.  And we're happy to do it for them.