Ladies and gentlemen… Justin Long’s patented Leg Move.

Edit: Don’t know what happened to the link, but here’s the real link.

Yesterday just was not fun.  All of the freezing rain from the day before and the snow in the morning caused problems all over the city.  From various reports, have of Springfield didn’t have power.  Our neighborhood was fine, but only our house had no natural gas.  I didn’t know it was possible for the cold weather to impact the gas line coming into the house…

I stayed home because of the weather and worked on my computer.  At around 11am I thought to myself that it felt a little too chilly inside so I decided to turn on the gas fireplace.  The pilot light was out, surely just blown out by a draft or something.  After 20 seconds of not being able to light it, I went over to the stove and discovered no gas was there either.  I called the gas company and reported it, they responded saying they’d send someone out.

Sometime around 2 I went outside to look at the gas meter (no clue what I expected to find, but I went anyway).  I could hear the gas “hiss” on the neighbor’s meter but mine was silent.  It was also completely covered by a hill of ice and snow.  Not wanting to mess anything up, I decided to just wait for Ameren to show up.

At around 6pm, after a day of a chilly house, they showed up.  I chatted with the guys and they said they had been working on gas problems all day, which suprised me.  I watched as they wiped off the gas meter and then knocked all the ice off the regulator with a wrench.  Almost immediately you could hear the gas flowing again.  They stayed around and checked our furnace and made sure everything was flowing as it should before taking off.  Thanks AmerenCilco for keeping us warm!

* quote from Mussulman.

That was after asking him about the wonderful weather he’s getting in Champaign.  Springfield has been getting freezing rain pretty much all day and we’re expecting 10-12″ of snow tonight.  We’ve got so much ice right now that the screens on our north facing windows here at home are covered with a thick sheet.

The lights have flickered a little bit – here’s to hoping that the sleet stops and the power lines stay up.

Finally, the way I always sit at my computer has been justified!  According to this article, the 135 degree, reclined position appears to be best for warding off back pain when sitting for long periods of time.

That is what you get now when you request olives on your Subway Sandwich.  I learned this the hard way, after requesting olives be added the nice girl in training who was making my sandwich put the standard handful on my sandwich (close to 10 olive slices) and was promptly corrected by the veteran sandwich artist training her that it is 3 olives only, just like the pickles, so the offending/profit busting 7 additional slices were promptly removed.  My question is why?  Is the profit margin so low in that franchise that anything more than 3 slices eliminates all profit?  Surely not.  And what is the point of offering a condiment if you are going to limit the quantity to such a low number that you can’t even tell it is on your sandwich?  I have asked both of these questions to the Subway company but they have not had a chance to get back to me at this time.  My guess is they are looking for other ways to increase their profits – limiting the amount of lettuce to 10 shaving slices only.   

This week we received a letter in the mail from Insight Communications, our cable provider. At first I just thought it was a bill, so didn’t open it right away.  But when I did, I found out that we are having our internet upgraded for free, this month!  Our current service is something like 384kb down and 4Mb up and will be going to 1Mb up and 10Mb down.  Wooooo!!