So it's -1 degrees outside right now, which before this week I would've said out loud like it was some kind of joke. Not wind chill. Actual air temperature. The polar vortex thing everyone's been talking about since Friday finally rolled over the whole Midwest and East Coast yesterday and today, and I've spent the last two days basically living in my office chair wrapped in the comforter off my bed like some kind of blog-writing burrito.
I'm not going to do the whole "here's what a polar vortex is" post because if you have a television or a Facebook feed you already know more about stratospheric wind patterns than you ever wanted to. What I will say is that my pipes under the kitchen sink started making a noise around 6am this morning that I can only describe as "concerning," and I spent twenty minutes with the cabinet doors open and a space heater aimed at them before I trusted myself to go make coffee. The space heater is a $24.99 Lasko I bought at Target two winters ago and it has never once let me down, so, genuine plug for that thing, it's earned it.
Meanwhile I've had CES live coverage open in a browser tab most of the day, which has been a weird kind of split-screen experience. Vegas is apparently sitting pretty in the 50s and everyone out there is tweeting pictures of the show floor lines, and I'm here typing with fingerless gloves like a extra from a Dickens adaptation. Intel's Brian Krzanich did his keynote this morning, his first as CEO and the first time Intel's headlined a CES keynote in a few years, and the thing that actually stuck with me wasn't the wearables runway stuff (they had models walking out in dresses and headphones built by Intel's partners, fine, whatever) but this tiny computer called Edison. Its the size of an SD card. An actual full computer, on something you could lose in a couch cushion. I've been doing this blog since late 2011 and I remember when a "mini PC" meant something the size of a paperback book, so watching the size keep collapsing like this never really stops being kind of amazing to me even when I try to act jaded about it.
Anyway. Back to the cold, because it's genuinely dominating my day more than any keynote is. My internet has been fine, for what it's worth, so all the doom-scrolling about the cable and phone lines being affected hasn't hit me personally, but I know a couple people on Twitter dealing with actual outages. What has not survived is my houseplant situation. I've got a little fig tree by the window that I am fairly sure is done for. It was already sulking before this cold snap and now the leaves have gone that specific droopy-crispy combination that means its over. I'm choosing not to think about it today.
The thing nobody warns you about with a cold snap like this is how much it wrecks your ability to get anything done. I had three things on my list today: finish a draft I've been sitting on, sort out some hosting invoice nonsense, and actually watch some of the CES streams properly instead of skimming liveblogs. I did none of these well. The invoice thing especially, I opened the email, read "your payment method could not be verified," and just closed the laptop and made tea instead. Somehow "it's too cold to deal with this" felt like a legitimate excuse even though obviously the temperature outside has zero bearing on whether my card is expired (it is, that's actually the real problem, I need to update it before this whole site goes dark on me).
If you're somewhere warm right now, genuinely, enjoy it, don't post about it, I don't want to know. If you're in it with me, my unsolicited advice is: let the faucets drip overnight if you haven't already, because a burst pipe is a much worse Tuesday than a cold one. I learned that from my downstairs neighbor two winters ago, not from personal experience, but I believe her completely and I'm not testing it.
Tomorrow the forecast says it's supposed to climb back into the 20s, which after today sounds borderline tropical. I'll take it. Going to go check on that fig tree one more time even though I already know what I'll find.