Thoughts While Shivering
It was 55° at midnight and that was the high for today with the low somewhere in the 30s forecast. It drizzled all day so the sun didn’t warm anything, and cleared out tonight to radiate away all of the stored heat. We have freeze warnings and watches on tap for the next two days, so cat blogging will definitely be delayed.
This BBC article about the Scottish National Party activated by inner 8-year-old. I snicker over the first sentence: “Nicola Sturgeon is to formally take over the leadership of the SNP from Alex Salmond.” I hope no one else understands why.
So Zero announces his support for ‘Net Neutrality and heads explode.
AT&T announced that it was going to stop installing fiber to about 100 cities because the rules are ‘uncertain’. They are ignoring the fact that the rules are uncertain because they and the other media moguls sued to overturn the old rules. They also fail to explain how the rules affect a decision to make their network faster and cheaper to operate with much greater capacity which would give them a competitive advantage … oh, wait, they don’t compete so they don’t need any advantage.
Ted Cruz has announced that ‘Net Neutrality was “Obamacare” for the Internet. Sorry, but Obamacare for the Internet would require everyone to pay a private corporation and be connected to the ‘Net, and hit them with a tax penalty if they didn’t comply. It would probably also block any public options, and provide for religious exemptions for those who believe it is a tool for Satan.
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Freezing in the Virginia mountains here, too! Last night was about 19/20 degrees. Temperature in the house is 72, but my feet are still cold! Geez. Usually this time of year, the average nightly temp is about 40. It looks like we may all be in for another exceptionally cold winter.
Sturgeon/Salmon(d) 🙂
As for the other, I have no opinion any more I’m so disgusted. Just received an email from Healthcare.gov again. I’m self-employed, so I lost my original insurance and finally got the site to recognize my input in March of this year (tried for three months). Now they want me to input all my new information and they will provide me with a new selection of policies. I just did this in March, but it seems to never end. There are days I think it would be easier to just shoot myself.
Fairbanks, Alaska is running above normal right now, so you and I might have colder than normal winters, up there it’s warmer. It’s the lack of ice in the Arctic. The cold air we are getting is coming from Siberia, and will be coming from the prairie provinces of Canada which are getting early snowfall. It was colder along the US border this past week than up in the Yukon and Northwest Territories.
But private enterprise is more efficient than the government…
There should have been a Medicare opt in for people. That would have definitely held down costs.
Yeah, I read some scientist discussing the fact that the last ice age may have started as a result of a prior unusual warming stage which circumvents the warm streams (like the Gulf Stream) from traveling north. It makes the north warmer and the south colder. Whether that is accurate or not, it concerns me that we’re really in the middle of a science experiment that we have no clue what the ramifications could be. Mother Earth is a serious taskmaster.
Oh, and the Tuesday high here will be 32 with a low of 18 at night. Good grief.
I hope no one else understands why.
and all the posts you posted after this one were about mackerel tabbies….
it got up to 73 here today, but the polar vortex is supposed to be returning shortly, like tomorrow, i think. it’s not even supposed to get down below freezing, but wind chill is going to make it feel like 19 or so – cold enough to be miserable, but not nearly cold enough to kill the fleas.
speaking of fleas. they’re undergoing a population at chez xs cats. argh.
There is a chance of the Gulf Stream and the Japanese Current both stopping if there isn’t enough cold water in the Arctic to power them. That will totally screw up the weather in Europe and the North American Pacific Coast.
Try to stay warm, Juanita. It’s spells like these that make me appreciate my Mother’s fireplace to warm up my feet.
Actually, until you said it I didn’t realize that I had done that, Hipparchia. It wasn’t done consciously.
Yeah, another round of cold enough to make us miserable, but not cold enough to provide benefits. The insects and small critters come inside for the heat, and make cats and people even more miserable.
Looking at the maps I think were are going to have to put up with this warm, cold pattern every few days for a while yet.
Yeah, weather is pretty screwed up down here also. In the past 2 weeks, we’ve had from near 0C to mid 30’s. Today was a nice 25C @ 2 PM, but it’s already dropped to about 18C @ 10 PM.
I had sushi for lunch (a bento box actually), with salmon, tuna (not the canned variety) & prawn (not little shrimp) sashimi, chicken teriyaki, gyoza and a nice seaweed salad). Yumm! It’s a new Japanese Sushi bar that opened in Bendigo, I was surprised to see it here as it’s one of a known high-end chain in major cities usually. If anyone is curious, bento simply means “convenient” or “convenience”. It was originally a slang term. 🙂 Another bit of trivia… The original IBM Thinkpad design was inspired by a traditional Japanese black-lacquered bento box when the designers met for lunch to discuss the design. Much like the 5.25″ floppy disk which was simply the size and shape of a paper napkin. 😀
Yesterday 50% of the US had snowcover, the normal range for November is 4 to 20%. Buffalo, New York is trying to dig out from 4 feet of snow. Looking at the world temperature anomaly charts, the North Hemisphere is a actually warmer than normal, while the Southern Hemisphere is colder. The cold in the US is offset by warmer than normal temperatures in the Arctic. We are experiencing a wind pattern caused by Post Tropical Cyclone Nuri that should dissipate later in the week.
Sorry, but ‘bait’ doesn’t appeal to me. If I’m not stranded in a life raft, I want my protein cooked to avoid any microscopic critters.
A lot of bad ideas were born on napkins, like the Laffer Curve that supposedly justifies giving tax breaks to rich leeches to increase tax revenue.
The only problem I had with 5¼” diskettes was teaching people which side went into the drive first. I had to get a special marker to label them for some of my clients, and then had to stop them from using magnets to keep them on document stands. The joys of user support 😈
I just got up and put the coffee & heater on. 🙂 It’s 6 AM and 6C! Was a cold night (as I expected). The BoM is forecasting 29C by 1 PM. They’ve also issued an ‘Extreme UV Alert’ with a UV index of 11 expected. I am so glad I get my ‘skin’ (melanin if you want to get technical) genes from my paternal Mediterranean side, and not my maternal Irish side! I’d burn today just hanging the washing out! 😉 😀
30 years ago, Victoria’s climate was considered quite moderate where temperatures varied around 25C all year on average. Now it’s 25C+ in a single day!
EDIT: LOL Posted at same time. 😀
I love *real* Sushi/sashimi. I acquired the taste during my stay in Japan (and curiously, whilst recuperating in my paternal grandmothers village in Sth. Italy with an Uncles family who were tuna fisher’s.) 🙂 I also learned that the best place to get AAA grade Aussie beef is Japan! LOL
They finally called a hard freeze warning with below 0°C for about 8 hours. I already have the plants inside and I’m dripping water to protect the pipes. This should be last really cold night for a while.
When I was flying out of Omaha, Nebraska [the home of US corn-fed beef] I only ate steak in Okinawa at the Kobe beef places. The chunks braised on a hibachi right in front of you were melt in your mouth good, better than any of the filets in an Omaha steak house. I never had a bad meal on the island.
The nice thing about winter here in California is watching it on the television as it happens in other states :).
Well, you could drive 50 miles and visit it in the mountains, which is convenient if you ski. 😉
Ah, but I go visit it in the mountains *after* it finishes snowing, after the snow plows have finished clearing the roads and the dump trucks have rattled through spreading sand and salt. I mapped out every state I’ve visited or lived in once. There was one commonality in all of them except for Pennsylvania: there’s places you can live in those states where you never have to worry about snow :). (Yeah, it looked sort of like a bowl, I’ve never visited Nebraska or the Dakotas and never intend to do so 🙂 ).
Nebraska and the Dakotas are OK unless the wind picks up or the Missouri is in flood.
When I came back from SoCal to Florida I had to wait a couple of days for them to clear I-8 because of snow. I didn’t have a problem with road conditions, but the semis were fish-tailing the first time I made the attempt, so I turned around before the Toyota truck got pushed off the road into a canyon. I was closed an hour after I turned around, and I had to wait out the chain requirement before I tried again.