Brrrrrr, Very Cold! -- 01/14/00

Despite a few cold snaps, this has been a very mild winter -- until this week. We got a few inches of snow yesterday but it is really turning cold today.
I don't think it ever got warmer than about fifteen degrees today (for those who are metric, that would be about minus nine Celsius) but with very strong winds bringing the wind chill factor down to minus seventeen (minus twenty-seven for you Australians -- I just checked online weather, highs in the 80's around Sydney, around 30 metric, nice summer day) -- temperatures overnight are supposed to be around zero (almost eighteen below metric) with wind chills that could reach the point where the F and C have the same value, about minus thirty-five)...
I think our bunny will have to come into the garage tonight.

I was at Pamie's site earlier. There was a forum question about journaling. I posted a comment there and I thought I would also post it here (through the magic of cut and paste). What I posted: I put up my website back in '96, posted a few "journal" type entries, more like personal essays, my adult son emailed me to say "Hey Dad, I didn't know you were such an exhibitionist." But what I had written was along the lines of looking at a lunar eclipse and remembering looking at a full moon with my father when I was a little kid, that kind of stuff, personal, yes, but not anything that I would hesitate to have published in a newspaper or something like that. My daughter was a freshman in high school at that time and, while watching me enter my very first posting, said "hey, you're not gonna use my name, are you?" so I gave her a different name, same thing for my youngest, who was in 6th grade at the time. Now she's a senior and he's a freshman, but I still use false names for them. I use my wife's real first name and also my eldest's real first name.
I've always been more of a reader of online journals than a journaler myself, but for the past couple of weeks I have deliberately tried to make my site more of an online journal and have been posting daily. I have been watching statistics and seeing readership creeping up -- for years my hit average was less than one per day -- but I have yet to break into double digits *grin*
I have no concerns about ridicule. I know that people who know me (friends and family members) have read my pages in the past. I have not heard from any of them since I started making it a regular journal, but since updates used to be very infrequent it just may be that none of them have wandered by in the past couple weeks...
Yes, I do worry about crazy people. (What's the point in worrying about sane ones, eh?) I don't have my phone number or street address on my website; although I sometimes write about living in Rhode Island, I don't give street and town informantion. I don't plaster my real full name all over it either, but it is there. (However, my name is not uncommon; searches I have done on my name have found me, but many pages deep in the search returns.) If I were to be out of town on business, I don't think I would announce that fact in advance.
I realize that I've used the email address based on my webpage that yahoo set up for me when they took over Geocities rather than my hotmail address containing my real first and last names that I usually use when posting here. Yes, I know only nice people are regular readers of squishy, but who knows what crazy might wander in....
--end of posted item--

I have been reading a lot of other journals over the past week or so... Since I joined the Speak Freely webring I have been trying to visit some of the other sites listed there. Sometimes one of those journals will have links to other journals... and they might link to still others... I sometimes find myself quite far away from where I started... I need to update my section of links to other online journals...
There's a lot of updating that I need to do... I've still not updated my section on distance learning nor my general section of interesting links... I also want to put up more photographs... If I should happen to stumble upon any fiction or poetry that I've written I plan to type it in. I know that somewhere around the house (i.e., in boxes in the basement) I've got some short stories and novel fragments.