Holy Icicles, Batman!

Brrrrrrrrrr, it's frigging frosty out there today! The temperature earlier in the day was -13C (8.6F), with the windchill making it -20C (-4F). If that wasn't bad enough, tonight it's headed down to -18C (-0.4F), and tomorrow is supposed to be -19C (-2.2F). Now, those figures do not include the windchill, which will end up bringing it down to about -25C (-13F) to -30C (-22F). Fun, no? Oy...

I just took the dogs out (of course they decide they need to go right when I start blogging!), and it's rather deceptive out there. The wind has died down, so it doesn't feel too bad when you first head out. It's rather charming - dark, snowy, the smell of wood fires burning... But after a couple of minutes, the fingers, nose and ears begin to get a wee bit nippy, and then the cheeks start to go (face cheeks, people - my toasty warm coat covers my butt nicely, thank you very much!), and I realize that it is not QUITE so nice out there as it first appears!

We've been getting more snow all day - steady, but not a whole lot more yet. However, it's supposed to keep snowing, and I must say the clouds are looking quite pregnant, so we can look forward to the birth of Mrs. Snowcloud's gazillionuplets. It's sounding like those snow shovels might just get a workout after all!

Oooh, they already DID get a bit of a workout! See?


"Hey, check it out! We got to work! We got to work! I don't know about Gramps, though. Look at him, just hanging there on the fence. I don't think he can hack it anymore..."

As I was freezing my ass off waiting for my car to warm up, I decided to take a couple of quick shots of our alley at work - just to prove that yes, we did get more snow there!


Alley - well, what you can see of it...


Loading area right beside where I park my car.

Yeah, they aren't the most exciting shots on earth, but it was dark and as I said I was freezing my ass off. What the heck do you expect? Geeeeez...

Pic I just took of our back yard - see how good I am to you guys? I go out and freeze my ass off again just to get you pics of the back yard and the hard working shovels...


Ooooooooh, even more damned white shit. Yay.

That's it for pictures tonight. I am not going out to take any more for you. I am staying by my electric wood stove and keeping warm and toasty, thank you very much. I have been freezing all day. It's so flipping cold in our office you could quite safely store meat in there. Thank God I went out and bought heaters for myself and the two other ladies in the office. We have a couple of guys who come in with enough layers of clothing on to easily clothe a small town, and they keep turning the heat down because they're too hot. Oy. Today I told them I was going to import penguins, as they'd be right at home in our office. Silly twits. (The men, not the penguins.)

I got home and it was quite nippy in here too, so I cranked up the old electric wood stove (okay, it's new, but let's not get picky), made myself a huge cup of steaming tea, and am now reasonably toasty. So you can see why I intend to stay here and not head outside any more than I absolutely have to. Hmm, I think maybe I'll litter-train the dogs this winter...

I have officially been de-modded! It was rather funny, because I popped into the site just when the site owner had starting working on the de-modding process. It was certainly odd to be there. When I first popped in, I still had access to everything. Then suddenly all the moderator icons (for moving topics, locking topics, etc.) disappeared. Then my link for the Moderator Options disappeared. Suddenly my name was no longer on the list of mods in the forums. The last thing to go was the actual Moderator Forum, where all of us mods - er, all of the remaining mods - discuss issues that are not for the eyes of the general members. That actually stayed open to me for awhile, and I was starting to wonder if he'd forgotten about it. But no, that finally disappeared too. So now I am officially back among the general ranks!

It's actually quite sad, I have to admit. Every now and then I keep thinking that perhaps I should have just stuck it out, but I know it was time to quit. In many ways I also feel relieved, and I expect it won't take too long before the sadness goes away.

I did get a fair bit of amusement out of things too. When a mod quits (doesn't happen often, but there have been three of us so far), the site owner gives us special titles. One was Angel, the other I can't quite recall at the moment, and mine is Domina. Domina??????? Sounds like a kinky S&M porn star, if you ask me! Now, the hilarious bit was that I decided to look it up on Yahoo search, just to see what would come up. Found a few links to a Domina hotel chain, one to a horse named Domina, and the rest were pretty much S&M and fetish sites! LMAO!

Then I did an Italian to English translation (the hotel chain was Italian, so I figured it was a safe assumption that's where the word originates), and it came up with "it dominates". That was from a site called Babel Fish, which translates many languages, although there are some questionable translations at times, especially when trying to translate complete sentences!

I also just did a Latin to English translation, from the University of Notre Dame Latin Dictionary and Grammar Aid, which came up with this gem:

"domina -ae f. [mistress of a household; wife , mistress, lady]; of abstr. things, [ruler, controller]"

I think I'm going to have to have a wee chat with the site owner about what he was thinking when he chose that particular title! I am sincerely hoping that he was focusing on "lady". As a Newfie friend of mine would say, "me shattered nerves"!

Well, I think I've about run out of scintillating things to tell you tonight, so I am off! Have a wonderful night, everyone! Ooooooooh, and Judy - thanks for the linkage and comments on your blog! XOX