I was planning on getting some shop work done today. But thanks to the Polar Vortex that’s plunged this portion of the Midwest into the deep freeze, maybe not.

The weather folks ’splained it all, and that Polar Vortex thing – despite the fact that they likely just made it all up – actually makes a lot of sense. See, it’s not really cold here at all, but cold up in the land of hockey and Tim Horton’s. This vortex thing is just throwing all that air down here, which explains the aroma of that wonderful Canadian coffee in my backyard. Our normal winter weather is still intact, except it’s now circled around to Greenland or somewhere. They say that in another day the vortex will move back up where it belongs, and we’ll be back to regular freezing weather and not Canadian freezing weather.

In any event, we here in the Ohio Valley are experiencing temperatures of -12 or so. My garage shop is the lowest temperature I’ve ever noted at 33.6 degrees. Regular readers know that I installed a small gas heater two winters ago, and while it does a nice job of making the shop comfortable on normal winter days, it can’t really bring a shop that cold up to a temperature I can conceivably work in.

Fortunately, I have other things to do in my office, not the least of which is to finish up the table of contents for a new book, plus design paperwork for a new project. Important stuff to be sure, so missing a day in the shop to take care of it isn’t that big a deal, and devoting a day to it will bring me up to date.

However, I only have about a day’s worth of paperwork, meaning that two office days in a row aren’t in the cards. So if I wake up tomorrow morning to a herd of confused Canada geese on my doorstep and a shop day isn’t possible, I’ll have to resort to that backup plan I’ve been promising myself: an all day binge-viewing of Breaking Bad.

A.J.