Personal note; Sundays...
I don't exactly take Sundays off from work -- I plan to do that when I retire, but I don't do it now -- but I cut myself all sorts of slack on Sundays. I don't do my daily thirty-minute walk on Sundays, for example. I don't work on my newsletters. I don't usually post much to my LJ. I don't clean anything. I read, and I watch television, and I do art... I look forward to Sundays.

We have no central heating in our underground house ... just an electric space heater that we run during the six weeks that cold weather typically lasts here, and that we've never yet needed earlier than the last few days of November. And the house has a natural limit: No matter how cold it gets outside, even when it stays cold outside for a long sequence of days, the temperature inside never falls below 59 degrees. Which means that it's possible to stay reasonably comfortable in here when the power goes off. [Our generator won't run the lights and the well and the refrigerator and the space heater, and the first three are far more important.] It was 60 degrees in the house when we got up this morning, although there'd been no heat at all here since about nine o'clock last night and we've just had a couple of days and nights of clouds and rain and snow. [Trivial snow, fortunately.] I think that's pretty amazing, myself. It does lend a certain briskness to the morning shower-and-hair-washing experience, but I still think it's amazing. It was very wise of my husband to build an underground house.

For our little Maltese dog -- who, unlike most breeds, grows no winter undercoat -- we have a round plastic "heating pad." You heat it for five minutes in the microwave and then tuck it securely under the bedding in the dog crate, and with the dog lying over it all night it gives off steady heat for twelve hours. And George assures me that by judiciously turning off a few other electric things we could run the microwave with the generator for the necessary five minutes without anything blowing up or catching fire. Which is a great comfort to me. Because Sheba is the sort of humungously spoiled little dog who -- if allowed to sleep in a bed with a human being even just one heating-padless night -- would consider herself entitled to do that forever after, and would therefore refuse to go sleep in her crate any more. At the moment she knows nothing at all about the advantages of human-being-beds on cold nights, and I intend to keep her in precisely that state of ignorance.

The Christmas tree in our livingroom is lovely, the snow has almost melted, breakfast was excellent, the electricity is on, the shower-and-hairwashing experience is over with... Just ahead, reading and television and art. Bliss.

Happy Sunday to you, one and all...