09:49 – It was warmer again this morning, a whole 17F (-8C). What it hasn’t done is warm up enough to melt the snow. The main roads are in pretty good shape. Secondary roads like ours have been plowed but still have lots of frozen stuff on them. Very few of the vehicles that pass our house are going anything near the 35 MPH speed limit, and most are creeping along at 15 or 20. On a normal day, most of them are doing at least 40 MPH when they pass our house, and quite a few maniacs are doing 60 MPH or more.
Barbara is going to the gym this morning, but later than usual. She has a noon meeting of the golf group that runs an annual fundraiser for the Wellness Center, where the gym is located. She’ll head from there to the Friends of the Library bookstore to work this afternoon until 1700. She leaves for Winston-Salem tomorrow morning for an appointment with her eye doctor and to run errands. She’s going to stay overnight at Frances’ and Al’s place and drive back up to Sparta Thursday morning. As usual, it’ll be wild women and parties for Colin and me while she’s gone.
Our garage is pretty well insulated. Even with an extended period of temperatures down in the teens and single digits Fahrenheit, it hasn’t gotten down to freezing in there. The lowest it’s gotten is 35.5F (2C), or a bit lower than the temperature inside a standard refrigerator. Still, just to be safe, I moved the liquid chemicals we had stored out there into the house until the weather warms up.
Science kit sales are running at about the same rate as last January, and we’re getting to low-stock levels on all of the kits. We’ll need to build more kits over the next couple of weeks. Until things warm up a bit, rather than building kits in the garage, we’ll do so in the unfinished area downstairs.
Never say the progressives don’t do anything useful. I followed a link yesterday to this site, which lists retailers that the site’s authors suggest be boycotted because they support Trump as well as another useful list of retailers they regard as desirable because they don’t support Trump. So of course their lists work just as well for us Normals. We simply need to patronize their boycotted list and boycott their recommended list. So, for example, instead of shopping at the “100% Trump-free” Target, we can all shop at nasty old Trump-supporting Walmart. Thanks for the tips, progs. There’s battle lines being drawn…