08:03 – Our low last night was 7F (-14C) or, as my grandmother would have called it, 25 degrees of frost. Our furnace ran pretty much constantly, but was able to maintain 68F (20C) in the house.
Barbara and I started watching The Great War Diaries on Netflix streaming last night, a reminder of just how quickly things can go from normal to catastrophically bad with little or no warning. Almost no one who woke up that morning at the end of June 1914 and read the newspaper headlines about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in an obscure town in an obscure Balkan country believed much would come of it. And yet within a month essentially all of Europe and Russia was mobilized and armies were on the march. The four years of slaughter that followed would change all of their lives.