As I noted, when folks (admittedly people from far warmer climes) came in for B-Fest two weeks ago, and complained about the temps (say, low 30s in the days, low 20s or high teens at night), I kind of laughed. Last weekend, less than seven days after that, showed why.
Things are just starting to get better, but the last week has been the worst extended cold snap Chicago has seen in over a 100 years. Meanwhile, my travails continue.
Although it eventully warmed up enough for my car engine to start after two or three days of it being just dead, my gearbox was locked in park. However, it appears that is also cold related, and while the extended 10 day forecast (for what that’s worth) shows nothing much above the mid-twenties for highs–and we’ve several days away from that heat wave–neither will we be seeing (hopefully) the sort of radical, sub-zero overnight plunges we’ve been getting for the last week. So at least, as it stands, it looks like I’ll have a functioning car. Worse case, I’ll have to run it for a while before shifting out of park. By next week even that shouldn’t be necessary.
Meanwhile, my water pipes in my trailer continue to be frozen. Since we’ve no sign of temps in the 30s anytime soon, I have no idea when this will change. And then there’s the good chance that the pipes broke, and will have to be shut down anyway until I get a plumber over here to eat up whatever small amount of savings I have.
Until then I’ll be shifting between nights at my waterless abode, and hanging out at Paul and Holly’s and their functioning shower system. I’ll try to get back into the swing of actually writing and posting articles (although I’m sure I’ve already screwed my B-Fest diary by waiting so long to write it), but frankly I’m pretty distracted these days.
This is especially lame after taking off half a year, and I really, really appreciate anyone still hanging around for the patience they’ve shown with the site. (Apologies especially to Chris M. for reorienting the site only to have me do nothing with it for this extended period.) I’m not sure when I’ll back in the swing of things, but when I do, I hope to push out a pretty good stream of material to make up for things.
