December 4th, 2013

caillebotte_man at his window

Big Chill Day One

The feral cats' water bowls did freeze last night, except for the one on the back porch which probably got some warmth leaking from the house. One other just had some surface ice that was easily broken, but the large one will probably take a couple of hours to thaw. The sun is up, but the air is still very cold, and it won't get much warmer. In fact the high today will be about the same as the low on a cold winter night in Los Angeles. I'm in the wrong place.

Opera is still behaving badly, so I'm using Chrome again and I've downloaded Thunderbird for email. Thunderbird is busy downloading some 14,000 emails that it didn't know about. It also picked up the old email address from the earlier version I had, and I can't figure out how to get rid of it. I haven't used that ISP in about seven years, and the email address is defunct. Thunderbird has an option for deleting an account, but for some reason it's grayed out so I can't use it. I guess it will just have to go on trying to download mail from a nonexistent account.

I've made Thunderbird my default email client, even though it is HUGE, so I will probably make Chrome my default browser. Chrome being quite small, together with Thunderbird it will take up about the same amount of space Opera did by itself. I will miss Opera, but if it isn't going to let me log in to any web sites, and isn't going to tell me how to fix the problem, I'll have to say goodbye to it.

I went to test my portable lamp last night and discovered that I'd forgotten to remove the batteries at the end of last winter, and they had leaked and corroded. I cleaned the contacts and counteracted the acid with some baking soda, and with new batteries it appears to be working fine now, so I won't have to replace it. It's innards look pretty bad (some of the plastic parts were partly devoured) but as long as it works I'm not going to buy a new one. I just hope it doesn't quit working the night the power goes off.

And the power will go off, I'm sure, if not during the coming storm then during a later one. Snow is still predicted for Friday, though the chances have been reduced to 80%. I'm still eating the stuff that needs to be cooked with electricity first, and saving the stove-top stuff until the storm arrives, just in case.

Thunderbird is about halfway through the pile of email. If I'd known it would take so long I'd have tried to figure out how to just leave it there. Maybe I can reduce it a bit by deleting stuff at the recent end from my online inbox. I'll try that now.