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first real hunkering of the season
Monday, February 2 2015
Last night we'd had more than a foot of snow, and it continued falling throughout the morning. This would be our first real winter-storm hunkering of the season. So again I brewed up a french press of decaf and we spent hours in front of the fire. Gretchen no longer has to work on Mondays, so instead she read and solved crossword puzzles for most of the day. At some point she went out and began shoveling the snow from around the Subaru, because she wanted to keep two appointments in Uptown Kingston for this evening. Eventually I finished the digging out, which was less of a job than it had initially looked like. The snow was light and fluffy and as dry as desert sand.
This evening when Gretchen went to start the Subaru, it refused to do anything, so it was a lucky thing I'd also dug out the Prius. In our area, the highway departments are very good at keeping the roads plowed, so Gretchen had no difficulty getting into Kingston and back without a four wheel drive.
Last night and into today, I've been watching episodes of Yukon Gold, which is the History Channel's answer to Gold Rush. I'm mostly into these shows to see how the technical challenges get solved, though with Gold Rush, there's also a certain amount of schadenfreude in watching religious idiots consistently fail as their faith-based approach keeps being outmatched by reality. With Yukon Gold, there's a lot less idiocy and thus less schadenfreude, and there is actual mention of things like running costs, and the reality that mining gold makes no sense if the expense of getting it is greater than its value. Discovery Channel does a real disservice to the meatheads who watch Gold Rush by eliding economic realities, leading them to think, for example, that the solution to America's energy needs is the drilling of more holes. It's actually less of a problem for those meatheads than it is for country as a whole; people misinformed about such realities are more easily snowed by demagogues like Sarah Palin and her more articulate ilk.
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