States Meme

[Bold = Visited, as in spent at least a night Underline = Lived Italics = driven through, purchased shot glasses there or had a layover there.]
1) Alabama, 2) Alaska, 3) Arizona, 4) Arkansas, 5) California, 6) Colorado, 7) Connecticut, 8) Delaware, 9) Florida, 10) Georgia, 11) Hawaii, 12) Idaho, 13) Illinois, 14) Indiana, 15) Iowa, 16) Kansas, 17) Kentucky, 18) Louisiana, 19) Maine, 20) Maryland, 21) Massachusetts, 22) Michigan, 23) Minnesota, 24) Mississippi, 25) Missouri, 26) Montana, 27) Nebraska, 28) Nevada, 29) New Hampshire, 30) New Jersey, 31) New Mexico, 32) New York, 33) North Carolina, 34) North Dakota, 35) Ohio, 36) Oklahoma, 37) Oregon, 38) Pennsylvania, 39) Rhode Island, 40) South Carolina, 41) South Dakota, 42) Tennessee, 43) Texas, 44) Utah, 45) Vermont, 46) Virginia, 47) Washington, 48) West Virginia, 49) Wisconsin, 50) Wyoming, and 51) Washington, D.C.

Baby, It's Cold Outside...

I really can't stay...
      Baby, it's cold outside...
I've got to go away...
      Baby, it's cold outside...

It was -8°F outside when I went to bed last night, and it was -8 when I got up. It was also 49° in my kitchen, despite the heat being on. There are three reasons for this last. First, there are no baseboards in my kitchen, and there's no available wallspace to install any. (Although now I'm wondering if there are any small enough to fit under the toekick of the kitchen cabinets. Need to look into that.) Second, the side door needs new weather stripping to stop the drafts, which I just noticed the other day, and will take care of this weekend.

The third reason is that the arrangement of the baseboards in the rest of the house wasn't designed properly. What they did was run baseboards around the entire perimeter of the house, without considering the size of the rooms. Thus the backroom, which is about 12' x 11' has 23' of baseboard in it. Since it's also the first room on the circuit, all the heat gets dumped in that room, leaving little for the rest of the house. The kitchen is at the other end of the house, so the the only heat source is what little drifts in from the dining room. They did it that way because there was less work involved, because they could do long, straight runs rather than putting in the proper size, then going down through the floor, across the basement, back up into the next room, etc. Feh. Anyhow, lots of thing to think about for weekend and summer projects.

Went to volleyball last night for the first time in almost a month. The session was full, which was nice for a change, and there were even a couple of newbies. I played pretty well, although it helped that I was on a team with the two best players in the group. We also had one of the newbies, who did well enough considering it was her first time playing ever. Blake tutored her as we went along, and she picked things up pretty quickly. We lost the first game, but after that we kicked ass and won the rest of our games. Go us!