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Yep, that’s cold!  But I slept with the dogs last night – they each like to sleep under the covers – Rummy in between my legs and Roman on one side of my leg or the other – he likes to be near Rummy but not touching when he sleeps.  I also have a down comforter, and since I am nearly always hot, I was actually sweaty when I woke up.  The only thing chilly was my nose!  So I threw open the covers and as soon as I stuck my feet into my slippers and stood up, I was like “wow, I am really cold!”  I walked into the hallway, and realized the furnace went out at some point.  My house was at 52 degrees. 

I am sure I’ve talked about this before (maybe even last year?) but we have an exhaust pipe on the side of our house where the furnace exhaust goes – not even sure if that’s right, but whatever.  If an icicle builds up on that pipe, then the furnace turns itself off for some reason.  All I had to do before was knock off the icicle on the pipe, come in and turn the furnace switch on and off, and it would start again, no problem.  Only one problem – I turned the furnace on and off several times before I had to leave for work and it kept shutting itself off.

So before I left I had to wake up Hannah and Jacob and tell them that the furnace guy was going to come sometime late afternoon.  I got a text from Hannah saying she lit a fire in the wood burning stove, and that the heat turned on by itself not too long after that.  I still had the guy come out and check everything out – he changed the angle of the exhaust pipe and thinks that will do the trick.  He also replaced my filters and only charged me $75 for a thorough inspection.  Not too bad!

So this was how I look when the air temperature is –10 and it feels like –22 with the wind.

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At least the sun was shining!  But look at the giant pile of snow that’s mounded up from the train parking lot – so big!

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So I was really looking forward to my hot breakfast.  Steel cut oats with a heaping tablespoon of granola, one teaspoon brown sugar and some of the Florida oranges from my parents in law.  I loved the citrus with the oatmeal!  Breakfast came in at 8 smart points.

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I was actually really busy at work, even though my boss wasn’t there.  I finally got a chance to really organize my desk and misc. papers that have been piled around the desk next to me, which I discovered only recently was a catch all of old paperwork that never found a home.  I had every intention of going to the gym, but realized I wore my gym shoes home last week, and only had my winter boots at work.  So I stuck around the office and ate lunch at my desk while I caught up on some blog reading – so far behind!  I had more vegetarian chili – a recipe which I never posted and I can’t seem to find the piece of paper with the recipe I wrote down while I was making it.  I hope to recreate it again soon, but this was leftovers from the freezer and with the cheese, comes in at 8 points.

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When I got home from work I made another batch of lasagna soup.  Probably in the several hundred batch by now!  This time I used bow tie pasta, and I almost made it too spicy for myself and had to add a tablespoon of heavy cream to my bowl to tone it down a bit.  This will most likely be enough to have for lunch the rest of the week – I never get sick of this soup!  With the crusty butter bread on the side, dinner came in at 11 smart points.

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Have you guys updated your iPhones yet? I just did today, and you know I am showing my age when I was happy to see that there is a magnifier!

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And if you can send me some on my comment love over at the Chopping Block latest blog post, I would appreciate it.  Thanks to Hannah who took some amazing shots for me in natural light during the day while I was at work.

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It’s funny because Hannah’s favorite part of those cookies is the shortbread, mine was the nutty caramel and Jacob’s was the chocolate Open-mouthed smile

I’ve got a busy couple days of work ahead of me – my boss is back and he wants to hit the pedal to the medal this morning.  I don’t mind though – makes the day go by fast!  I didn’t even bother looking at my weather app this morning – I doubt it could be any worse than yesterday.  Make it a great day!