Thursday, January 6, 2005

9:42 PM Here are two new entries in the Crosswalk weblog: Earthquakes and the Second Coming Not Our Kind of God 8:19 PM We leave for China in seven days. This time next Thursday night, we’ll be on the plane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. 8:16 PM The coldness is made a bit worse because we’ve all been sick this week with various forms of URG—Upper Respiratory Gunk. Marlene had it first, then me, and Mark and Nick had it a little bit. When we talked to Josh in Beijing yesterday, he said he wasn’t feeling so good. It’s a family thing, I guess. I felt blah on Tuesday, worse yesterday, better today until a few hours ago. I don’t think I helped myself by spending almost two hours outside this AM running the snow blower and scraping off the cars. I didn’t feel bad when I did it, but now I’m sort of run down again. 8:12 PM Now it’s just plain cold. I like the snow just fine, but 18 degrees at 97% humidity is a lot colder than 18 degrees at 30% humidity. Somewhere I read that when NFL players said it was too cold to play football in Green Bay, Vince Lombardi would tell them that it was like Arizona in reverse—”It’s cold but it’s a dry cold.” Well, this is not a dry cold. It’s a wet cold and I’m feeling it tonight. That’s partly because Mark and Nick used the snow blower to build a huge igloo in the back yard. They’ve been out messing around in the snow, which is fine, but then they keep forgetting to close the doors all the way when they come back inside, which is not fine.