A couple of interesting home notes.

1. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but the roof to the building I live in runs off right in front of my back door. Literally. This means you get soaked when it rains, or when snow melts. Like today. We also have the added bonus of melting snow and ice falling from the roof.

As you can imagine, in some cases this results in icing on our deck, making the use of the back door (which leads out to our parking space) difficult at best. Such as last night, when Sarah's dad was able to get the door open enough to leave, but then had to contend with the curling-quality ice sheet on our deck.

2. There's something very odd going on with the water here. I had hot water coming out the cold tap before going to England (kind of a pre-trip reminder about the taps being on the side opposite to what we have here), and emailed our Facilities department about it.

On return, I still have hot water coming out of the cold tap. Want a fun mental image? Consider a toilet bowl full of water hot enough to make coffee.

Today, though, the water seems to be doing whatever it wants. At one point this morning the taps had switched (hot out of cold and vice versa), then it went back to hot out of everything. Most lately it's been normal, but I'm expecting to see salt water and egg nog run from the taps this afternoon.

If nothing else, I was able to use one problem to fight another, as I used the extra hot water to melt the ice around the back door. Easy egress for now.