08:24 – It’s currently sleeting, on top of about six inches (15 cm) of snow. More frozen precipitation is forecast through this afternoon, shifting from sleet and freezing rain back to snow. There’s been zero traffic on our street since before we took Colin out last night.
Colin isn’t used to snow in significant amounts. When I took him out early this morning, he was obviously surprised when he stepped down off the porch and his legs sunk deep into snow. He tried making snow paws, but even that didn’t keep him on the surface of the snow. I just walked him halfway down the block and he kind of staggered at each step. As I just said to Barbara, we won’t yell at him if he has an accident in the house today. There’s enough snow on the ground that if he tries to squat he’ll be squatting his nethermost regions into the snow. Talk about freezing one’s testicles off.
All of the schools and many businesses are closed today, but Barbara’s law firm doesn’t close no matter what. So she’s taking a vacation day today, and will just watch TV and work on kit stuff.
09:29 – I just got email from someone who’d ordered some chemicals from Elemental Scientific. When they arrived, he found that the cap was cracked on a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid, and wanted advice about how to proceed. So I replied to him and then carried a box of chemicals that arrived yesterday from Elemental Scientific down to my lab. I unpacked the stuff, including a couple liters each of reagent-grade concentrated hydrochloric, nitric, and sulfuric acids and 30% hydrogen peroxide. No leaks, thank goodness.