Brrrrrrrrrr

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I had a blissfully hot shower this morning. I closed the bathroom door and kept all that hot, moist air inside. Ahhh.

Winter has come to South Puffin.

Wind chill advisories went up on Saturday night for “feels like” temps of 28-32°F. In South Florida.

winter feetsThat was up in the United States so it never actually dropped that low here. But it has been that windy. I put the blanket on the bed Saturday night and laid out my flannel shirt for Sunday.

Most houses in the Keys don’t have central heat so when the outside temperature drops, the inside temp follows. Up to North Puffin it was 9° Sunday morning and partly cloudy with a 30% chance of snow, although all the snow on the radar was over New Hampshire and Maine. The forecast 19° high temp there was not a warming trend.

It was 52° here after a couple hours of solar heating and the Wind Advisory stayed in effect for winds from the North at 15-25 mph with gusts to 35-40. Same 10° thermometer climb here Sunday as up north. We went all the way to 63°.

We broke our fast at the Cracked Conch. The old fogies who gather there on Sunday mornings always take over the “Crank Corner,” a counter out on the deck.

Noooooooo.

Everybody moved inside. The Conch doesn’t have air conditioning but they do have windows. All the windows were shut. And, it turns out, they have heat which was turned on!

Whoda thunk it?

I spent the day yesterday in the living room, reading and poking the ‘puter. Having the patio stone1 in my actual lap was quite nice. I did cover my feet with a blanket although the temp rose to 56° outside and 60°(!) on the porch.

My next door neighbor has company. They had all the doors open there when he got up yesterday morning; he was seriously cold. He complained a bit about that when he came over to warm up. “I’ll do outside when it drops to 70°,” he said. “I don’t do 68°!”

My lap blanket felt pretty good.

It got even colder overnight. I woke sometime in the darkest hours and thought about getting up for the second blankie. I didn’t because it was all the way at the other end of the house. I guess I didn’t need it but it surely was cold this morning. 60° here in the sunroom first thing. It was 54° and mostly clear when I arose at sunrise. We’re allegedly headed for a high of 70° but with a windchill as low as about 45° on breezes from the NNE at 20-25 mph. 16 mph “breeze” right now.

I don’t understand why my friends in North Puffin aren’t more sympathetic.

lonely boot in the snow

1Patio Stone: Liz Arden’s pet name for my 26 pound square, black, laptop with its 17″ screen. It puts out a fair dinkum amount of heat.

Monetized

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First rule of writing: write what you know.

I write a blog which means I do occasionally read OPB (Other People’s Blogs). And when I read, I often comment.

order screenSo.

I seem to have a couple-three logins at different blogging softwares but they all come back to the gmail account associated with the No Puffin Perspective™. They display my own name and everything, since I don’t snipe anonymously.

A friend sent me a link to a LiveJournal blog today. It started an interesting discussion about ownership and privilege; I logged in to make a comment. LiveJournal gave me a couple of options: LiveJournal itself, Facebook, Twitter, Openid, Google, MailRu, Vkontakte, or Anonymously. I won’t autolink my blogging to Facebook or Twitter because you never know what might end up tweeted on your wall. MailRu, founded by Yuri Milner, is the largest Internet company in the Russian-speaking world. I don’t speak Russian. Ditto for Vkontakte. I’ve never bothered to get an Openid because, well, I have gmail.

So I clicked the GooglePaw and gave LiveJournal my email address, fully expecting to see my name and the North Puffin avatar show up. I saw “ext_1649750” and a crash test dummy.

Went looking for a way to change the avatar. Did so.

Google Plus now probably has a low res bird on my page instead of my smiling mug.

Went looking for a way to change the user name. And that’s where the story gets interesting. LiveJournal is perfectly happy to change my public name from what they assigned to what every other account uses. For $15.

I have a better idea.

I deleted my LiveJournal account and I recommend everyone else do the same.

First World Problem

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Did you ever wonder why your stick of margarine comes out of the waxed paper broken in the middle?

margarineWe don’t use a lot of margarine but every stick in the last few pounds out of the freezer has looked like this.

I tried Googling for the answer. Out of about 6,290,000 results, 6,289,004 came back that “No insect will touch margarine and neither should any human.”

I don’t care about the butter aisle wars. Butter was a no-no. Saturated fats are a no-no. Now trans fats are a no-no. Butter is “all-natural.”

Pfui. According to the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 21, butter and margarine each must contain a minimum of 80% fat. The difference between them is simply the source of the fat: butter is made from cream (moo), and margarine is made from vegetable oil. (“For the purpose of this subpart P ‘butter’ means the food product usually known as butter…”)

Margarine can be used just like “butter” in most types of baking. Since margarine is softer than butter, you probably should not use it pastries and candy made from a boiled syrup. For the record, Anne makes excellent pie crusts but she uses lard.

This is a slippery slope and I don’t care what’s at the bottom. I just want to know why the stick is broken.

Heh. Slippery.

The Pennsy1 still ran when my mother and grandmother were at Swarthmore College but that train station is now part of SEPTA. The fare to and from Central Philadelphia is currently $4.25 during off-peak hours, about the cost of two pounds of butter on sale. Despite the fact that butter comes from cows, this is not the story of the cow in Parrish (cows will climb up but can’t come back down the stairs).

It seems a group of students who shall remain nameless because their legacies might still want admission saved their butter from the dining hall for most of a term. Freezers weren’t available then, so I’m not sure I want to know its condition when that same group wandered down to the Media Local tracks and slathered and slathered and slathered. As you might expect, the train rushed into the station and rushed right on through, much to the surprise of everyone aboard.

College students are one reason butter costs so much more than margarine.

Can I freeze margarine?
Yes, but probably not the whipped style or the low-fat brands which charge you to replace about half the fat with water. Place the package in an air-tight container or freezer bag. Freeze before the use-by date on the package, and store frozen up to six months. The limit is mostly to inhibit freezer smells.

I don’t think freezing had anything to do with the broken sticks I have. We’ve been buying margarine on sale and freezing it for most of my semi-adult life. The sticks sometimes come out a little bent at the corners but they rarely look licked and never have been so consistently pre-divided.

The floor is open for suggestions or scientific proofs.

Me? I think someone dropped the entire pallet of margarine off the top rack of the warehouse.

1“The Pennsy” was the affectionate name for the Pennsylvania Railroad, the largest railroad by both traffic and revenue in the U.S. for the first half of the twentieth century. It was at one time the largest publicly traded corporation in the world.