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trouser crisis Monday, February 12 2007
I do not like weather.com, though I check it obsessively. It's a noisy, poorly-organized site and finding the things I want always ends up turning into a treasure hunt. I don't care about made-up figures like wind chill factor and spectator index, I want to know temperatures, the actual placement of front lines on a map of the United States, and historical data. Historical data is where weather.com really lets me down. For whatever reason they have decided not to provide archives of historical weather data, though they do provide averages and records for every day in the upcoming month. I find this information useful when making strategic decisions about the solar collectors and the firewood supply, so since December I've been archiving this data as it becomes available so that it will be there when I need it next year. [More recently I've rediscovered weatherunderground.com, which has a much tidier interface and lots of historical data, which is even available in comma-delimited form!]
This February is proving to be much colder and drier than average for this climate (at least according to data at weather.com). Today, though, there was a high of 35 degrees, which was a little warmer than it has been (though still somewhat less than average for this time of year). I took the opportunity to harvest firewood from dead trees in the nearby forest. Later I went into town to get hydronic antifreeze, dry pigments that can be mixed with epoxy, and three pairs trousers. For pigment I wound up buying pastel sidewalk chalk (which I can grind into a powder), since that was the closest thing to what I wanted at Michæl's, the supplier for all your white trash craft needs. As for trousers, I'd suffered a corduroy-destroying seat rip while bending over the other day, and it had thrown me into something of a trouser crisis. (I am perhaps the only person alive whose quantity of functional laptop computers is greater than his quantity of presentable trousers.) It turns out that the trousers I like at Old Navy are nearly as cheap as those for sale at the Salvation Army, with the added bonus that they don't come with someone else's crusty old skid marks. (Someone once told me that he likes to wear corduroys on itchy-ass days.)
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