Yesterday I attended a memorial service for the mother of a friend. I hadn't known her, but the stories revealed a remarkable woman. She took it as a badge of honor that the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on her lawn because of her role in desegregating the school system in her town.

The National Weather Service just published a blizzard warning for southern New England. The snow will start mid-afternoon and continue until tomorrow morning. The worst of the storm will be to the southeast of us, toward the Cape, where 20-30 inches of snow is possible; we're expecting 10-20. The winds will be strong and the temperatures low, meeting all of the criteria for a blizzard. It was -10F when I got up this morning and probably won't rise beyond the mid-teens.

We'll visit with A,J,&L this morning in Florence (the village in Massachusetts, not the city in Italy, although A&J did honeymoon in the Florence across the pond. Theirs was the Florence to Florence world tour.) We also have to tend to a couple of errands and then we can settle in for the duration.

When nerds get bored, watch out.

The little routines of winter are now well established. We back the cars into the driveway so that, if the car won't start, it's easier to connect the jumper cables. We keep a mixture of sand and salt by the door. In this very cold weather, salt doesn't work, but sand helps to keep walkway safe. The forecast is calling for a substantial snow storm, with high winds, starting tomorrow afternoon. It'll warm a bit when the snow comes, so the snow blower will be easier to start.

In this morning's spam: "cough syrup particle accelerator". I'm pretty sure that I don't want to know any more. (Spammers believe that if they include random words in their message, spam filters won't be able to catch the message. Good spam filters aren't fooled and can adapt quickly.)

We'll visit Adam, Jennie, and Lily tomorrow morning. We haven't seen them since Christmas and haven't been to their house since Thanksgiving.

In the "Ready when you are, C.B." dept., we have this news story. A scientist works on a project for 18 years, puts the instrument on the Saturn space mission, and then learns that someone forgot to turn the thing on. (The "Ready when you are, C.B." references goes back to an apocryphal story about Cecil B. DeMille. One rendition of the story is here.)

[Recently I've noticed that there's been a delay in the delivery of some journal entries. The message on Martin Luther King Day, for example, didn't show up until Wednesday. It appears that the problem originates at the web site that creates this web log. This is the second time that this has happened. I like the current web log hosting site, but if the problem becomes chronic, I may need to investigate alternatives.]

Today at work, we're scheduled to have a group party at a local hotel. There will be food 'n stuff, probably a speech or two, and opportunities to be formal and ill at ease. (We still recall the time when, several years ago, Sandra and I attended her company's holiday party. I stepped on the foot of the wife of the vice president of engineering.) I'm hoping that I can stay in the office and work.

The company closed its office in Maryland yesterday afternoon. For two inches of snow. Two inches of snow! We eat two inches of snow for breakfast.

But, then, we're not like the brave folks in Ottawa, where nails in their houses are exploding because of the cold.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Some people are marking this inauguration day with individual protest.

I talked with my manager yesterday and learned that my contract has been extended until early May. He said that, unless he comes in to tell me to clean out my office, my contract will be renewed automatically. We talked briefly about permanent employment. There's nothing available right now nor is anything likely to open up this quarter. Nevertheless, it's good to know that my work is useful and that I'll have continued employment.

Statistics can be interesting. For example, Firefox now has between four and five percent of the web browser market, about the same percentage as the number of climbers who die on Mount Everest.

I don't, as a rule, read the spam that comes my way. I receive on the order of 150 spam messages each day. Not only is the stuff unpleasant, but it can also be dangerous. About 20% of the messages carry some kind of payload. Anyway, one message, sent to an address that I rarely use, caught my attention. In French, it invited me to a web site where I could purchase a book that is leading the charge against heliocentrism. "... that Holy Scripture does in fact undeniably present the universe as geocentric and the sun as being in motion around the earth."

Not willing to fall further behind the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy style mavens, the People's Republic of North Korea has launched a program against long hair. Let us trim our hair in accordance with socialist lifestyle warns us that long hair has a deleterious effect on intelligence. It takes a lot of nutrition to sustain long hair, robbing the brain of energy.

Bob Dylan, however, observed, in an interview published in 1966, that not only is long hair warmer, but it is beneficial to the functioning of the brain. "But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of one's hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head. Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head, the better."

As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens. We have almost a half hour more daylight than we did at the solstice and the cold has moved in for the week. I briefly considered putting on shoes when I went to get the newspaper from the driveway, it was that cold. We're not likely to get above freezing for a week at least.

(When searching for a source for the lengthen/strengthens phrase, I learned that the Kiwis have something similar, although their time starts in June.)

We went to the camp Sunday afternoon. We realized that we'd need to walk in when we were in our car sliding sideways down the icy hill. The ice on the lake was soft in places, but this week's cold will take care of that. One tree had fallen into the water and there were branches scattered around, but there was no damage to any of the buildings.

Lynn returned to work last night. They are brave. A household with six children gets to rebalance itself. When I returned to work in July, Sandra and I wondered how we'd ever get all of our chores completed with both of us working. As I've mentioned before, what we would call a large dinner party, Mike and Lynn call just another weekday supper. For all the chatter I provide in this journal, ours is a very simple, tidy life.

To the mountain top.

Yesterday we visited with some long-time friends in Connecticut. We hadn't seen them for more than two years, so we had a lot of catching up to do - our families, our work, our selves. It was good to see them. We have the ability to pick up our conversations pretty much in mid-sentence. The hours passed quickly.

Among other things, we wandered around the themes of our own retirement and aging. What will be our next act? Or, more importantly, what will be our next acts? Retirement will be a major transition in our lives but it probably won't be our last one. Our lives will continue to evolve, just like they do now, based on our own abilities, the needs of those we love, and circumstances that catch us by surprise. Retirement is a while yet, 10 years or so, plus or minus, depending on the behavior of our presidents and of the stock markets.

A friend once said, "Want to know how to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans for the future."

It's important to take this stuff seriously, but not too seriously. We want to be as prepared as we can be so that we don't wind up, at 85, eating cat food from cans and living out of the back of a VW Microbus. At the same point, though, we (I) have to approach this with humility. It's been said that every generation believes that it invented sex. The baby boomers, some of us anyway, (me), behave like we're inventing aging and retirement.