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compute where it's warm
Wednesday, November 24 2010
Gretchen's mother can't tolerate the normal conditions with which we keep our house. That applies a little to cleanliness (she finds dirt pockets and cobweb tapestries that had gradually and invisibly grown enormous in full view), but it mostly applies to household temperatures. If living space air is 60 degrees, I consider that warm enough. I generally won't start a fire unless temperatures have fallen into the 50s. But with Gretchen's mother in the house, I've been stoking the fire for maximal heat output. I stoked it up so nicely last night that the ceiling fan in the living room was still turning this morning, meaning temperatures under the ceiling were still over eighty degrees. It didn't take much effort to bring the first floor up to somewhere in the mid-70s, which most people consider an ideal temperature (though some fussy people might turn on the air conditioner at that point).
Normally if I was going to be doing computer work, I'd be off in my laboratory. But that would have been antisocial with guests in the house. Also, it was comparatively cold up in that laboratory. So I brought my little laptop out to the dining room and worked on a complicated project allowing me to interactively add tables to a DHTML-based GUI database map. The project involved AJAX techniques and the complicated production and disposal of DIVs containing menus. The screen was small and there were more distractions than I normally work with, but I made good progress. Mostly I was ignored by the three or four cooks in the kitchen, who puttered away preparing the larger parts of tomorrow's Thanksgiving. Their conversation consisted entirely of cooks' banter, a dialog whose content includes nothing but the elaboration of logistics. It's an easy thing to tune out.
At noon, I made Gretchen's parents each vegan BLTs. This was the first time her father had ever had a BLT of any description (though, despite having lived a mostly kosher life, he told us a story of eating actual bacon once when he was a kid growing up in Louisville).
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