After a winter of unprecedented warmth, tonight we're getting our second major snowstorm of February. Perhaps it's karma, perhaps it's regression to the mean.

But most likely, it's that the warm December and January meant the lake never froze, so when cold finally did arrive, the lake effect snow machine was rarin' to go.

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Victor Borge is dead, but his spirit lives on. Below, an Argintinian group named Les Luthiers.

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It's been a rough couple of days. I had to cover for someone at work, so I've put in 40 hours in the last three days, and that included covering overnight. I was bone tired when I pulled into the driveway and pressed the button on my garage door opener. The door failed to move.

It's been quite a while since I replaced the battery in my remote, so I pulled right up to the door and pressed the button again. Nothing. I put the car in neutral and set the parking brake and walked up to the door. We've got an external electronic codepad to open the door. Did I mention it was raining?

Anyway, when I typed in the code, I noticed that the door was shifting noticeably and I heard an ominous humming noise over the sound of the rain.

There is a man door for the garage, but it opens inward, and stacked up against it were several bags of fertilizer that my father-in-law had gifted me. (He thinks that the quality of man's soul is reflected in the quality of a man's lawn. Me, I think dandelions are beautiful, and that if God didn't want me to have beautiful flowers on my lawn, he wouldn't make it so that said beautiful flowers appear without any effort on my part.) After some grunting and shoving, I got the door open enough to squeeze inside and take a closer look at the door.

One of the torsion springs had broken. I disconnected the garage door opener and tried to lift the door. No dice, it's an old-school wooden door and weighs far more than I can lift.

The problem is that while my car is now sitting in the driveway, the door failed with my wife's car inside the garage. It's now trapped there. And she's got a bunch of meetings tomorrow in several locations. Tomorrow morning we will see if we can borrow her parents' car for the day. If that falls through we'll just rent one. It turns out that car rentals are not too expensive in the middle of the week in the offseason- we can rent a small car with no notice for less than $50/day.

While home repairs of a torsion spring garage door are quite doable, they are also quite dangerous. The spring that didn't break has a lot of potential energy stored up right now, and I'm just a sack of meat. There are several garage door places nearby, and I suspect I can get one to come over tomorrow on short notice, because it's also the offseason for home construction. I hope the repair bill isn't enormous. I have no idea what to even expect, cost-wise. We've got plenty of savings, so I'm sure we can cover it, but that doesn't mean I'll be thrilled if the bill hits four figures. And I'm very much suspicious that it will.

EDIT 12/16: Repairs cost $230. That was pretty darn reasonable.

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Some happy news! My wife's sister and her husband have been trying to have a child for something like six or seven years now. I am pleased to share the news that they are now, as the saying goes, "with child" and are expected to be downgraded to "with infant" at the end of May.

I'm an uncle three times over, but this is my wife's first niece of nephew. Yes, when she married me she became an aunt for those three, but it's not the same as a sibling having an actual baby while you are paying attention.

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Halloween can be fun for young and old. But it's also dangerous.

A friend of a friend was at a party when her costume was ignited by a candle. Her injuries are sufficient that she was flown to the regional burn center, and is currently in an induced coma. Her survival seems doubtful.

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So, a week ago today (Monday) I was on a bike ride.

That's not in any way unusual. Swimming is boring, running is uncomfortable, so cycling is where it's at. (Cross-country skiing is nice too, but the limitations are obvious.)

I was figuring on going out for an hour or so and covering twenty miles. To warm up, I headed for a nearby park, which has a looping bike trail. I'd do two or three loops to get loose, then head north into the farming country.

The second turn on that bike trail loop is a sharp downhill right. I've taken it literally hundreds of times, but this time as I was leaned over going around it, my rear tire lost traction and skidded out. I was leaned over far enough to make recovery impossible, so down I went on the pavement at 16.8 mph.

I was very happy that I was wearing my cycling gloves. The leather palms do help pad your hands on the handlebars, but their most important mission to to be an ablative armor for your hands. I burned entirely through that leather palm, but only had a few minor cuts on my right hand.

The rest of me wasn't quite so lucky. I had road rash on my shoulder, all the way down my arm, on my hip, and on the outside of my right leg. The hip was by far the worst. I had kept my head up, so I didn't so much as touch my helmet to the ground.

I managed to ride myself home, then peeled out of the damaged clothing. The gloves were ruined, and so were my bib shorts. Oh well. We didn't have any gauze in the house, so we called upon my sister-in-law across town. Her husband is a nurse. Unfortunately he was out of town camping, but she brought over the drawer into which he empties his pockets when he gets home from work.

I had to work the next day, which wasn't fun at all. I broke the office dress code by wearing a polo shirt, because I couldn't get comfortable with a dress shirt over my arm dressings. The hip was the worst. Normally I try to get up from my chair and walk around whenever possible, but Tuesday I just planted myself and tried not to move much.

Wednesday through Friday I had off, time which I spent productively by not moving much and healing. The weekend at work wasn't great, but oh well. Tomorrow I'm back at work, but I've got a nice professional dressing for my hip, and most of the rest of me is fine.

I can't laze about all summer, though. I'm going to try running on Wednesday, and see how it feels.

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For the last three years, I've been joking about how it's a good thing our cat Aria is friendly, because she wasn't earning her keep. It wasn't her fault– inexplicably, this century-old house hasn't had any mice for all this time. (It's not really that inexplicable, because there are hordes of stray cats outside, a challenging gauntlet for any mouse that wanted to find its way to our house.)

Well, last night Aria was unusually active. I figured it was pent-up stress from us having an overnight houseguest a few days ago. When Hil left for work at 8 AM, Aria was sitting on the floor staring at the ceiling. "Cats, who can figure them out!" Then at 8:30 there was some thumping. I arose at 9 AM (hooray for vacation), and quickly discovered a dead mouse in the corner of the kitchen. Aria was sleeping on a comfy chair, looking very pleased with herself. The mouse had made its last stand hiding under my full-sized suitcase, and the thump was caused by little Aria shoving it aside. The suitcase weighs twice what she does, so I'm impressed.

I disposed of the rodent's remains, and gave Aria extra petting. She wasn't interested in play later that day. I'm not sure if she was tired out from stalking the mouse all night, or if she has decided to put away childish things.

UPDATE: Three days later, Aria is playing with a live mouse. That's not good. We want a mouser, not a cat with live toys. We're going to have to get traps after all.

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This wasn't a set-up from the previous post, I promise. But two people that I had emotional connections to just died, and I'm not feeling like blogging at the moment.

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I like cake. I very much like cake. But there's a limit. In the past ten days, I've eaten eleven different cakes. Folks, I'm done with cake for a while. I need a cake break.

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I just discovered that a woman in my book club has the same birthday as I do. That's cool. She's also a twin, so like me she shares the birthday with her twin.

She married a guy that has the same birthday.

They got married on the day of their mutual birthday.


I know it's not a competition, but I feel like I've been outdone.

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