Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

I’ve been gone from here a lot lately. It’s been a gloomy, drippy solsticial season. I still take my nightly strolls, but it’s been pitch-dark when I get home from work and shame myself out the door like a reluctant cat.

Today, however, the cloud cover dissipated and there was this brief harbinger of longer days at the lake, when a week ago there’d have been an inky black hole where this photo was taken..

I don’t have a Super Bowl favorite, don’t think I’ve seen either team play. That’s not a surprise since I leave it all on the couch on Saturdays during football season. Some years I find myself fast-forwarding through the game play to just see the ads.

In other news, our 52-year-old Payne gas furnace died last week Well, it didn’t actually die, it was euthanized by a gas company employee who was working on our meter, took one look at the old crone and forbade us to re-light the pilot light.

Suddenly I’m having to educate myself about heat pumps and side vents and SPEER and BTUs.

We each have our respective person-caves with electric heat (my office downstairs with a Vornado and hers an upstairs bedroom with baseboard heat) but the rest of the house reminds me of when I used to do inventory in cold-storage warehouses, opening containers to ensure that their contents were really frozen King Crab legs and not barnacles scraped off a crab pot.

Snd this welcome ability to remain comfortable in these segregated spaces means that the bathrooms are tantamount to outhouses, with the attendant discomforts.