Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Statements/thoughts/obersvations that go together:

• "That block of olive oil is an interesting colour."
• "Wow, my fingers are painfuly cold."
• "The dish detergent isn't coming out of the bottle."

Last night I observed that when the kitchen gets down to 278K (40°f;/5°C), the olive oil is difficult to coax out of the bottle, and is an interesting colour with a ^cl_lum^oud_py texture. (That is, cloudy and lumpy; probably technically a slurry, but the frozen bits being ill-defined and hard to distinguish so the visual effect is of a lumpy liquid more than a mix of lquid and solid.) This morning I noticed that if the kitchen stays at that temperature long enough, the olive oil becomes a solid, translucent block that doesn't move when the bottle is inverted. After breakfast I went to do the washing up, and absent-mindedly reached for the spot where the dish detergent lives and waved the bottle over the dishes in the sink, to be jolted back into paying attention when nothing came out, at which point I finally looked at it and saw that it too had frozen -- into a cartoon-blue blob with teensy bubbles in it.

I feel like I'm mostly adapting to the chill, but then there are details like my hands getting cold enough to really hurt while I'm chopping garlic, or my toes taking a long time to warm back up when I've been out of bed a while (I actually got Perrine to stay put on top of my toes last night, which helped), or the minor inconvenience of having to run the olive oil or the dish soap under hot water before using them, to remind me that, yah, this is definitely colder than most folks' houses.

(Similarly, ointments with a petrolatum base become difficult to squeeze from their tubes at some point around 285K/53°F/12°C. Not impossible, just very difficult.)

I was thinking it might be useful to know the melting points of various cooking oils, to refer to when shopping for supplies for a cold-weather camping trip. (Oh, look, Google found me a partial table of gets-cloudy temperatures (but not freezing/melting points) on a site about biodiesel.)

In related news, I did manage to re-repair the standing electric heater (oil-filled radiator type) -- it just needed a connector crimped tighter (one of those slip-over-a-tab connectors found inside some appliances ... the kind on the back of most old-style (before ATX) computer front-panel power switches). But I still don't know why neither electrical outlet in the bathroom works, so I'm feeding the heater via an extension cord snaked up the stairs from the kitchen. So I don't think I can get away with running two heaters at once in there (as I've done in past years: run one full time to keep the bathroom at a tolerable temperature for sitting on the toilet, and run another one just before and during a shower to raise the temperature to something not-insane for stepping out of the shower dripping wet). This most recent cold snap brought the bathroom temperature down to 284K/52°F/11°C, a couple degrees colder than I'd hoped, but bearable as long as I dry off very quickly and bundle up in a thick bathrobe right away.