If You Can't Stand the Heat...

...don't turn it on quite yet.

This will be the first truly cold night of the fall, thanks to the arrival of a Canadian cold front this morning. As I've said before, I'm not a really big fan of cold mornings, since I tend to hit a lot of extra snooze alarms on such days (and my tall-ceilinged bathroom never gets quite warm enough during a shower), but I don't think it's time to turn on the heat. For one thing, this is a short cold spell; tomorrow will be in the 70's, and the low returns to the upper 50's tomorrow night. (Besides that, the first night of heat always smells bad and tends to dry out the house more than usual, and I'm already fighting a dry mouth from my extra allergy medicine as it is.) It just doesn't make sense to flip on the heat for one night; I'll just turn off the ceiling fan in my bedroom and hope for the best.

Along those lines, there was a good discussion over at Althouse last week, where the good Professor was trying to encourage people to lower their thermostats not just to 68 degrees (as I've been doing the past two years to save energy), but to 62; she says it's also better for your health and helps prevent colds (though I'd like to think that my "secret weapon" in that area is the Vitamin C tablet that I take with my multivitamin each morning). Not everyone agrees with her, of course, but it made for a great topic of conversation. (I weigh in, late to the party, with the story of my college apartment with no thermostat at all, just an on-off switch.)

At any rate, I doubt it will get down to 62 in the house tonight, but I'm willing to take my chances and give the heater a raincheck for now.

NEXT MORNING UPDATE: Going heatless worked just fine; the house temperature was 71 degrees as I went to make breakfast. The fan in my room will go back on (using a lower setting) as I'm leaving the house today.

His GPS nearly made him a human lemming: An elderly German motorist trusted the global positioning system in his car so much that he drove through barricades and past signs clearly marked "road closed for construction." He ended up driving right off the road and into a pile of sand. At least there wasn't a cliff nearby...

Just in case Rover or Fluffy get carded at nightclubs: It's now possible to buy a replica of a drivers' license for your pet.

A small Fry story: Developers are about to release their final plans for Fry Street in Denton; local preservationists (and Tomato fans like myself) are hoping for the best.