January 12, 2005

• How cold is it?

  Cold enough.  The thermometer says it’s -27°F/-33°C.  For
  days it has been creeping ever closer to the mystical forty below zero
  where the two scales converge.  For a while, the barometric
  pressure was creeping downward, seeming to promise some warming, but
  it’s on the way back up again now, at 30.2″.  Funny, I never used
  to pay that much attention to the weather.  But that was when I
  was younger, farther south, and not depending on a little woodstove and
  some fairly unreliable rural electric power to prevent hypothermia.

  The outdoor temps are relevant, but what really matters to me is the
  temperature in here.  By continually feeding wood into the stove
  and running up the electric bill, I’m keeping it in the mid fifties
  Fahrenheit most of the time.  That tends to dip when I go to bed
  and Doug takes over the fire watch.  Last night as he watched me
  rearranging the coals, leveling the bed of embers to make room for more
  fuel, he said, “fire building, or arranging, should be an Olympic
  event.”  I guess he was complimenting my skill.  If it was an
  Olympic event, I might be a contender.

  I work at it, not just for my comfort but for the survival of my
  houseplants.  Sometimes I think it’s absurd, setting myself up
  this way to have to battle the subarctic cold to ensure the survival of
  a collection of tropical plants.  But when the outdoors is white
  seven months out of the year, all this green indoors is comforting,
  good for my mental health such as that may be, if any.

  I was kneeling in front of the stove a few minutes ago, using the
  blackened old rock hammer that was the only firetool left behind by the
  previous residents, and the antique silver-handled fireplace poker
  that’s part of a set of firetools given to Greyfox by some people who
  didn’t manage to sell them at their selling-out-and-going-south sale a
  few years ago.  My purpose was to move some of the coals from the
  back of the firebox where they pile up because there’s less airflow
  back there to burn them.  The bed of coals needs to be somewhat
  level to get as much wood in as possible and not have it slide back out
  when the door is opened.

  The coals are hot.  I was wearing insulated leather gloves, but
  they’d get hot fast and I’d have to retreat and shut the door to cool
  both the gloves and my face.  My face has felt sunburned for days,
  since the beginning of this cold snap, from all that time exposed to
  the glowing coals.  There tonight I started noticing a sweet,
  meaty smell like barbecue roasting on a spit.  I guess Koji
  noticed it too.  He jumped off the bed and came over and started
  sniffing at my cheek.  Then he licked it.  I elbowed him away
  before he started nibbling.  Just a moment ago, Granny cat jumped
  up on the bookshelf next to me here and started sniffing my
  cheek.  Darnit, I’ve cooked myself.

  Some
  parts of the house are warmer than others.  I’ve got the back room
  closed off to conserve heat.  It’s probably below freezing in
  there.  The temp in the fifties is on thermometers placed near eye
  level in kitchen and living room, not attached to any exterior
  walls.  There’s frost on the plastic sheeting over all the
  windows, and on some of the walls.

  This picture is of the frost on the drape over the window at the head
  of my bed.  The light-colored upper part is the drape, and the
  darker part below is the frost-speckled cushion that I place across the
  head of my bed to insulate me from that north wall.  It’s a
  Hollywood style bed without a headboard, and some insulation is needed
  there.  I tend to turtle down under the covers to sleep.

  ---

  How the Earthquake Affected Earth

  NASA scientists studying the Indonesian earthquake of Dec. 26, 2004,
  have calculated that it slightly changed our planet’s shape, shaved
  almost 3 microseconds from the length of the day, and shifted the North
  Pole by centimeters.
   …

  According to their latest calculations, the Dec. 26th earthquake
  shifted Earth’s “mean North Pole” by about 2.5 centimeters (1 inch) in
  the direction of 145 degrees east longitude, more or less toward Guam
  in the Pacific Ocean. This shift is continuing a long-term seismic
  trend identified in previous studies.

  The quake also affected Earth’s shape. Chao and Gross calculated
  that Earth’s oblateness (flattening on the top and bulging at the
  equator) decreased by a small amount–about one part in 10 billion.
  This continues the trend of earthquakes making Earth less oblate. Less
  oblate means more round.

  They also found the earthquake decreased the length
  of the day by 2.68 microseconds. (A microsecond is one millionth of a
  second.) In other words, Earth spins a little faster than it did
  before. This change in spin is related to the change in oblateness.
  It’s like a spinning skater drawing arms closer to the body resulting
  in a faster spin.

  There’s more in the story linked above.
  

  • 1:32 am
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