I like the cold especially if it lasts for a while. Today it was 2 degrees most of the day. This is ideal for the machines that heat our buildings. They have a really hard time dealing with fluctuating temperatures, but at steady temperatures they work well. Once it gets nice and cold and stays cold you can fall into a pattern of living that is adapted to it and extremely congenial. All you need is foresight.

I come home regularly to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg variations. Sometimes it is other things but very frequently the Goldberg variations. Today I came home to The Art of Fuge with the volume turned up nicely. It is no small joy to me that my wife has learned to enjoy this stuff so well. Back in 1999 I had to ban WCTS from at least being perpetrated in our apartment when I was around. From there to the genuine enjoyment of Bach is a long but upward road.

She is into changing desktops nowadays. The other day it was something unappealing but recently more appealing: some mountains with low clouds. Not very good colors in that last one, but still an interesting landscape. Now the present one is rather curious. It shows the face of a brick building with three windows. In the windows, or emerging from them like ghosts, are three semi-nude female figures all devoid of arms. They are all white and grey, and I think they are supposed to be supernatural manifestations.

I’m awfully fond of my wife. Even though she tried to serve me a baked potato a few days back as a general rule I get better food than I deserve.

I have been working on a new idea to revitalize some old stuff. I am going to have space-going Incas in my great Science Fiction Opus Magnus. To that end I am going to have to master a bit of Quechua. First, however, a taste of the blurb:

New Cuzco, the remote capital of the intragalactic Incas is sending out a greater fleet than before. Instead of sending again a sullen Red (insert Quechua word for red here) fleet in greater numbers, the king orders out the Yana fleet. What can it mean if not despair and universal annihilation?

So I’m going to use this link quite a bit. Notice it has links to Inca legends. I was also trying to listen to Quechua radio but not very hard. If anybody knows of a good Quechua radio station that streams online, let me know.