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Peak Cold, 2010 Saturday, January 23 2010
Gretchen donned a fancy baby doll dress she bought in Florida and went to the City to attend another gala for animal rights activists. Once the peaceable kingdom arrives, there are going to be fewer reasons to party like it's 1999 up in this bitch.
Because of my intimate involvement with household heating, I pay close attention to the weather at this time of year. When there is no weather news, I consult historical data. For this reason January 23rd is always an auspicious day. In Hurley, New York, you see, January 23rd is the coldest average day. In a perfectly average year, from this day until late July, temperatures will increase. What this means to me is that if there is still a half tank of heating oil (and we actually have slightly more than a half tank), we'll make it through this heating season on one tank. And if we have lots of firewood in the shed, I won't have to break my back gathering it in the months that follow.
On that last measure, I wouldn't say we're doing all that well. We have a good amount of wood, but the prolonged early winter cold snap and the occupation of my time by web development have acted to burn up a lot of wood precisely during a period when I couldn't do much to restock the supply. Today, though, I made a wood-cutting foray into the nearby forest in anticipation of torrential rains predicted for Monday. I thought it would be best to gather downed firewood and have it put away before it had a chance to get rained on.
This evening I was listening to Slayer's Seasons in the Abyss and paying special attention to the stereo separation. It struck me that stereo is a fairly unnecessary luxury, particularly for amplifier-based music. Do you really care where in physical space an electric guitar is when the amplifier could be across the room from where the guitar itself is? Still, the placement of sounds in stereo space ends up being a craft like any other, and as I listened, it seemed that whoever had done Slayer's production had done a great job.
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