Tuesday

A little excitement here today with a quick dump of 4-5 inches of snow. I think these last few days qualify as official Winter days.

Here's yet another example of me getting just plain old. My normal winter attire these last few years has been jeans with a sweater over a polo shirt. It's not like I have had an inventory of 30 sweaters, but I have had enough so that it wasn't like I was repeating myself every few days. And I've always had plenty of polo shirts. Even so, I guess one could say that I have set a pretty low standard. With this most recent cold spell, I've taken to wearing a t-shirt under the polo shirt under the sweater. I remember Daddy wearing layers of shirts on the farm. I guess this is more of me becoming him. And I don't worry about how it looks. I mean, it's been cold out there!

In case anybody is worried, I am not dating any astronauts.

Davenport had a water main fail yesterday that affected a wide area including downtown. Lots of inconveniences for residences and businesses. A sidebar story described the problems of frozen water pipes in homes. That certainly brought back memories. We had to take extraordinary measures on the farm with electric heaters to keep the little pump house and the milk house warm enough to keep water flowing to support the Grade A milking operation. I doubt if OSHA would have approved of our system. It's a wonder that we didn't burn the barn down.

It is also my recollection that we had at least one bout of frozen pipes at our Scott Street home in Davenport in the '80's. The brilliant builder of that home had placed one of the pipes to the upstairs bathroom along the front exterior wall. Not that great of a move. But the pipe did not burst and there were no fatal (read expensive) results. That was a cold house. Period.

For the Language Arts students in the crowd, here's a couple of advanced vocabulary words from a national Op-Ed column from today or yesterday discussing the descent to civil war in Iraq. Pogrom is a noun of Russian origin describing an organized persecution and massacre of a minority group. Atavism is a noun of French origin used to describe a reversion to remote ancestral characteristics. I feel like I have a pretty good vocabulary. I had a clue about pogrom. Atavism was completely new to me. Are these writers that good? Or do they have some kind of an automated thesaurus in their computer?

OK. Rivalry Week and Super Tuesday all in one. I'm headed to the bike.

Pretty quiet in the peanut gallery.

Be careful out there.