(no subject)

Hi world.

Exhausted here, going into day 3 of the planning week at work. Last night i had to catch up on the day's emails and get all the notes arranged to document the tasks we have to do as discerned from the design meetings. That put me in bed much later than i like.

Yesterday morning it looks like we got below freezing for five hours or so. I know that there's a microclimate out where i park my car: i think it has something to do with the pool and some very localized low that pulls cooler air across the car to rise over the warmer pool. The car often has frost when there is simply heavy dew on the railings nearer the building. Yesterday though, water was solidly frozen on the sidewalk. (The irrigation system is still running? Oy!) I'd not pulled my potato plant close to the house and had left it sheltered just by the deck wall when this cold spell happened. I fear i've lost the plant. Since potatoes need much water, and this is our wet season, i'd hoped to get a larger crop this winter. Fiddlesticks.

This morning, it looks like it dropped to freezing at 6 am.

One of my happy discoveries yesterday is that, despite near constant use of the space heater, we have used less power than this time last year. The power company website has a nice analysis that tries to correlate power use and temperatures to help one compare power usage year to year. Their analysis indicates the last billing cycle was colder than the one a year before, and we are still using less power overall. That delights me as i think we are actually MORE comfortable this year with the space heater in the room we are in (lug, lug, room to room). The unit has electric baseboard radiators, probably form the original installation in the 70's, and the thermostats on them seem only to be effective in the front. So for the previous years, we'd run the heater in the front, and make do in the back, only occasionally running the heaters.

This year we set the thermostat on the space heater to 66 to 68 and just keep ourselves comfy.