Well, was the coldest night here in 6 years or so. My thermometer said -25 this morning. The wind was rather light this morning, so wind chills weren't as bad as they could've been. As I getting to work, there is a tall smokestack NW of here, and it was belching smoke, and it's so cold the smoke can't dissipate very fast, and the wind was blowing it to the SE, so there was this long blanket of smoke that partly obscured downtown, it must have stretched a few miles.

I'm enjoying The Great Fire, by Shirley Hazzard. It's artful in its use of precise language. However, my only complaint is one that literary novels can fall into, and that is the characters all kinda sound alike. More to the point, they all probably sound like the author. When writers try to get too cute and too literary, characters don't sound as believable. Even common people express lofty thoughts in high-falutin language.