Two posts for the price of one!

Because I am a so-called manager, I tote around a work-issued laptop computer -- so that I can do more work at home, of course. Having a work-issued laptop feeds not one, but two of my personality disorders. I am a workaholic and I am a technogeek. So imagine the nirvana into which I've been launched. After a several-week delay, I received my new work-issued laptop yesterday. It ain't no beat-up ThinkPad; I'm toting a Mac Titanium PowerBook G4, with 1 GB of RAM and a 1 GHz processor. Now I'm looking for excuses to do work at home. (Confidential to utexas.edu: I'm becoming a Mac person again. I'm returning from the dark side.)

As a transplanted Midwesterner, I know a thing or two about being really, really cold. It's really, really cold here on the Edge of America, by Floridian standards, but the reaction is a tad absurd. The NBC affiliate posted a little box on the bottom of the screen with the temperature -- and left it there all night, over Will and Grace and Good Morning Miami and ER. It had made its way down to 35 degrees by the time the news was over. In the early morning sun, it's 29 right now. The National Weather Service says it hit 27 overnight -- making that my personal Florida record low. It hit 28 here one day the last time we lived here. One school district north of here, expecting an overnight low in the mid-20s, canceled school on Friday. For cold. "We don't want kids standing out in the elements waiting for buses," they said. The day in January 1994 when it was 24 below outside our apartment in Cincinnati, you can bet your ass the kids were going to school.

I'm going to go let the battery from my PowerBook keep me warm.