Science! Get Over Here and Explain the Macaroni Miracle

I secretly laugh every time I anthropomorphize “science.” Ha, anyway, my week: weirdly shitty with a chance of resolving okay. Take the titular “Macaroni Miracle.” This evening, this very evening, yes, I dumped boiling hot pasta water over my fingers. And while the skin on those fingers is kind of tingling as I type this, as if the nerves aren’t sure about being jostled too much, they don’t seem to be actually burnt.

How can this be?

I want to guess that it’s some mixture of the salt in the pasta water lowering the boiling temperature (much like it lowers the freezing temperature?) of water and the fact that, though to me it sure seemed like the water poured and poured and poured, it probably only happened for a very short time.

Still, I don’t know. It’s strange.

I may have become fireproof, too, there’s always that. But I’m not going to devise an experiment to test.

Head Down, Think Book Thoughts

1. The burning jealous rage, how I know it!

2. Amazon plays hardball. Never forget.

3. Yes, Martin Amis is kind of a jerk.

My Superior Plumbing Moves

So, last night, I was going to wash my face, only to discover that we had no hot water. Turn on cold water? Water. Turn on hot water? Nothing.

FUUUUUUuuuuuuck. I thought.

So, I went into the garage to investigate, and I noticed that the door to the outside was open. I swung it shut. This morning? Hot water has returned.

So, that’s nice, on the one hand, that I was able to diagnose the problem–ice–and fix it–raise the temperature in the garage above freezing. On the other hand, my old house is so poorly insulated that merely shutting a door between my garage and the outside helps trap enough heat that is apparently just rolling out of my house into the garage to raise the temperature in there above freezing even on single-digit nights.

It’s kind of a win-lose situation. I try not to think about it.

In other news, the bathroom sink drain is open again. I want to somehow take credit for that but I didn’t do anything. It clogs for no reason. It starts to work again for no reason.