Arctic Air Coming

When I first checked the temperature this morning, it was 8°F (-13°C). After a while it went to 7°. I turned to the TV weather to see what to expect for the day. The weathergirl said, “Enjoy today because it’s going to get cold!” Good to know. I’ll run right out and enjoy the warm.

A winter storm dropped 7 inches of snow onto my small central-Virginia city two nights ago. I shoveled my sidewalk clear, but I was the only person around here to do that. Apparently none of my neighbors know how to operate a show shovel. Insert shovel into snow, scooch it forward, lift and toss. Maybe the instructions should be printed on the handle. Homeowners are supposed to clear their walks within six hours of a snowfall ending. It’s a law that is never enforced.

Right now the day is sunny but we’ll get a short blast of snow this evening. “Up to a half inch,” is the prediction. And more snow/sleet is expected Saturday. It could be a lot worse. I could be in Boston, where they’ve had 59 inches of snow this month and 96 inches this season. Seven inches of snow on my sidewalk is not a problem. Ninety six inches of snow on my sidewalk – that’s a problem.

Another problem is approaching: daytime highs over the next 3 days will hover in the teens and nighttime lows will dip below zero, down to -4°F (-20°C). Like the song says, Baby, It’s Cold Outside. Will the water pipes in the crawlspace beneath my house survive?

The day did warm up. By 11 AM the outside temperature had risen to the freezing point – or perhaps in this case, the thawing point. I fired up the kerosene stove and placed it in front of my chair. Now when I park my butt in the chair, waves of comforting warmth are beamed toward me, and for a little while all is good.

Waiting

It’s a cold, gray Monday. I have food. I have candles and kerosene in case the electric power goes out. Nothing to do now but wait.

The overnight low was supposed to be 8°F. It was 16°F when I checked this morning. Now it’s half past noon and the temperature has warmed to 22°F. That’s it; that’s going to be the high for the day.

The cold weather began moving in Saturday night with winds blowing 30 mph and gusting to 40 mph here and to 50 mph a few miles away. About 8,500 people lost electric power due to tree limbs falling on power lines, and occasionally a tree would blow over and land on a house. The local news showed an apartment building with a downed tree slicing through its roof. The tree cut through 3 bedrooms in that building.

The snow is supposed to start around 10 o’clock tonight and drop 5 to 8 inches of the white stuff on the city. The temperature has been in the 20s for days, so the ground is frozen hard and everything that falls will stick. The forecasters say that toward morning the snow will change to sleet. Lovely.

It could be worse. I could still be living in Roanoke, Virginia. One snowy winter I took this photo of cars in front of my apartment building. That, as I recall, was 15 - 20 inches of snow. My friend CyberDave still lives in the Roanoke area. He probably says, “It could be worse. I could still be living in West Virginia.” Bluefield averages 34 inches of snow annually, but there are places along the spine of the Allegheny Mountains that average over 100 inches per year.

Frozen pipes are a concern, too. My house has survived many cold winter nights, but the temperature normally doesn’t get into the single digits at night and low 20s during the day and stay there. The word used by the local TV station’s meteorologist to described this weather: “unprecedented.”

So I’m waiting. I see snow-shoveling in my future.

Wiener Conundrum

About twice a year, I develop a craving for chili dogs – wieners in buns topped with chili and diced onion. When I go to the store to buy chili dog fixings, there are a confusing number of decisions to be made in selecting a package of wieners. First of all there are all the various brands, with each brand proclaiming its distinctiveness. Then there are the various types of wiener: all-beef, chicken & turkey, kosher/non-kosher, etc. And on top of those choices, stores now have to stock regular and bun-length wieners.

Regular and  bun-length! It begs the question, “Why not make the bun the correct length to fit the wiener to begin with?” Then the store wouldn’t need to stock wieners in two lengths. Problem solved.

Maybe the bun people and the wiener people are not speaking to each other. I decided that for a proper article, I should do a little research and find out what’s going on. So I did. It turns out that the bun people are using English measurements while the wiener people are using metric measurements. No wonder they’re not compatible!

I’m kidding, of course. No one in America uses metric measurements. But I did learn something. Suppose you want to buy wieners that are as long as the bun they’ll be put into. Should you buy regular wieners or bun-length wieners? You may be thinking, “Why, bun-length, of course.”

But you’d be wrong. Regular wieners are actually as long as a regular hotdog bun. On the other hand, bun-length wieners are actually longer than the bun; they poke out of the bun a little bit at each end. They should really be called little-bit-longer-than-the-bun-wieners, but that’s probably too many words to fit on the label.

And I haven’t even touched on another vexing problem. My package of wieners held 10 wieners, whereas my package of buns held 8 buns. I’ve always wondered about this, and I have a theory. I think the extra wieners are for when you drop a wiener or two on the floor. After all, they’re wet and slippery little buggers and, when dropped on the kitchen floor, are apt to roll under the fridge or through the kitchen door and under the dining room table. The extra wieners also make good “table scraps” for Rover (and possibly Ginger, though I’m not sure a cat would eat a wiener – they’re fussy creatures).

My theory unfortunately does not explain the thinking behind one company’s policy of putting 7 wieners into each package. No bakery will ever market a 7-count pack of buns. It’s like the wiener people are being non-standard just for spite.

And that is why I make chili dogs only once or twice a year. It’s just too complicated.

Pentatonix Wins Grammy

I wrote about Pentatonix just last month. But that was before they won a Grammy. So I’ll write a bit more and hopefully I can plow some new ground.

Pentatonix are five young people who comprise the world’s most popular a cappella vocal group. (The name is derived from the pentatonic music scale which has 5 notes.) Pentatonix was formed in 2011 when three friends from Arlington, Texas – Scott Hoying, Mitch Grassi, and Kirstin (“Kirstie”) Maldonado, all 19 years old at the time – decided to compete in season 3 of NBC’s The Sing-Off. They found base singer Avi Kaplan through a mutual friend, and they found beatboxer Kevin Olusola on YouTube. The group first met on the day before the audition. They practiced their song and choreography for 12 hours straight, nailed the audition, and won a spot on the show – competing against 15 larger groups. Pentatonix went on to win the 10-week competition, and with it a $200,000 prize and a recording contract with Sony Music.

But Sony Music didn’t know how to promote the band – a cappella is not exactly mainstream. So the band got busy and set up a YouTube channel for their music and started shooting and posting music videos. They sold music through iTunes and a small record label that produces movie soundtracks. They also used social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google Hangouts, and SpreeCast to interact with their fans. Less than 4 years later, they’ve produced several top-ten albums and have 7.5 million YouTube subscribers. They began touring to sold-out venues in the U.S., Great Britain, Europe, Southeast Asia, and Japan. Their latest Christmas album (That’s Christmas To Me) was the #4 album of 2014 (and the #1 holiday album). They’ve been invited to the White House. They’ve performed at the Kennedy Center Honors 2014 honoring Tom Hanks. They were presenters at the American Music Awards 2014. They were co-presenters at this year’s Grammy Awards. They recently filmed a cameo appearance for the movie Pitch Perfect 2.

Somebody at Sony Music took notice and signed them to a contract with RCA Records, a flagship label of Sony Music.

They are not merely amazing singers who can produce incredible harmonies without the need of production gimmicks like auto-tune and overdubs. When they cover a song, they take it apart, rearrange it, change the rhythm, change the melody, shift to a different key in the middle of the song, and put it back together in a unique way. They do mash-ups so perfectly that by the time you figure out what song they’re singing, they’ve already transitioned seamlessly into a different song.

In late 2013, they recorded a medley of hits by Daft Punk. Daft Punk is a French electronic music duo whose music is a blend of house music and synthpop. For the medley, Pentatonix recorded a music video (which they named "Daft Punk") in the apartment where two of the band’s members were living. They hung a large black curtain on a wall beside the kitchen appliances, set up light rings, and used blue contact lenses and special make-up to give the video an other-worldly feel. That music video earned the group a Grammy for Best Arrangement, Instrumental or A Cappella. In accepting the award for the band, Hoying said, “We recorded this in a bedroom closet, we filmed it in a kitchen, and now we’re Grammy winners. It’s proof that anything can happen.”

Anything can happen, but Pentatonix have worked very hard to make it happen. They’re in the big leagues now, and the days of filming a music video in a kitchen are fast disappearing in the rear window.

White Winter Hymnal (Fleet Foxes Cover)

Run To You (Pentatonix Original)

Daft Punk mix (Grammy winner)

Love Again (Pentatonix Original)