Let me wish all of you a belated happy new year.
The first two weeks of the year were very bitterly cold. Not until yesterday was it warm enough to melt the snows of the past fortnight. I had to take the interstate to work most mornings because Wheeling Pike was too dangerous for travel. That in turn ate into my travel time (Wheeling is the shortest route) and gas. And yet, my new car is holding up very well so far.
The XMas tree is back in the closet, and the humidifier is back out of it. The constant cold has made the air so dry that I decided to use it for the first time in a couple of years. That means buying distilled water for the thing, because the tap water in my house is mineral-rich and would trash the humidifier in no time flat.
I have no big projects planned for 2010. I intend to have the furnace cleaned out. I want to have the back roof inspected. And maybe I want some gravel put on the driveway and along the street, since it is starting to look like the weeds are winning over them. And the deck will need to be worked on, since the winter weather is really hitting it hard.
The first thing I did on my three-day weekend, now that I am paid up on my andywest.org Web site for another year (and on andy.west.name for another two years), was to set up a new primary e-mail address. One of my subscriptions, TechBites, got its address list cracked a month ago. Now the spam is pouring in, mostly prescription scams. Now that my e-mail address is ruined, it is time to abandon it. The new address is already changed on the sites I visit the most; the others I may as well let drop.
While I was doing this I discovered that my sister the editor had created a profile of the local library for LibraryThing. It was evident that the profile was written before the move to the new building, so I had to bring it up to date. [Fairmount Public Library] Come to think of it, I should update this as well; now that over a year has gone by, it is not all that new anymore.