I have been contemplating getting an electric kettle for a while. The primary concern being to avoid burning the house down. It may be unlikely, but it was close to happening before. The concept is simple, you (1) feel like drinking a warm water-based beverage, (2) fill the kettle with water, (3) place the kettle on the stove, (4) turn on the stove, and (5) forget about it. Most stove-top kettles will be screaming their heads off by the time you get to (5), but if you have somehow already left the house before then, the water will evaporate, the kettle will stop screaming and start burning on your stove. Whether that goes all the way to burning down your house depends on how soon you come home.

The simplest solution to the problem is to remember to turn the ketlle off, or to come home early on a regular basis. But this is America, land of consumerism, so the next best solution, is to buy another kettle… that turns off automatically. After some debating, last week-end I purchased an electric kettle at Wal-Mart.

Except that I had made the assumption that all electric kettles have the auto-off-when-the-water-boils feature built in. To me, that is the only reason to own an electric kettle: without it, we’re back to worrying about burning down the house again. Well, it turns out that the $14.99-kettle at Wal-Mart does not have that feature. As Romeo kindly pointed out, there is no mis-information here, the box the kettle came in did not list the auto-off sensor as a feature, under the clear-plastic-that-shows-the-water-level feature. Good thing this is America: I will just return the fully-functional kettle for a refund on my credit card!

Winter is definitely here, most boats have left their moorings in Woods Hole’s Little Harbor, either for warmer climates, or perhaps, for dry docks where they will spend the winter, but an intriguing floating item has made an appearance that an empty harbor did not leave unnoticed. Close up, the item looks like a Christmas Tree on an iceberg, and at night, the tree lights up! It creates a nice warm, fuzzy feeling every time I drive by it.

The other cool Christmas-y decoration to have appeared in our neck of the woods, is a large Christmas wreath on Nobska Lighthouse. That would be the lighthouse that everybody goes to when in Woods Hole, the pretty, Cape-Cod-like, lighhouse that makes it into every tourist’s photo-album and postcard collection. If I have a chance, I’ll post the shot we took last week-end on this site.

The last decoration worth stopping by is our own dressed up dwarf X’Mas tree. If you’re nice, you may even get invited inside for some hot chocolate

They say New England has an Indian summer and for 2006, well, it was true! The temperatures had been unbelievably mild lately, and I had been adding quite a few miles to my bike on week-ends… Until this week-end that is. For those like me, who had nurtured the secret hope that maybe winter was going to forget us this year, I will have to break it out loud and clear: Winter is here, and all that goes with it.

It started with lower than usual temperatures: from afternoons in the mid 50’s last week, we had dropped to the low 40’s by the week-end. Then it was the crazy wind storm Friday night. Winds were so strong that the sailing boat on its trailer in our back-yard litterally flew off its trailer and was sitting by the side of it the next morning. Finally, this morning, it was the snow!

The cold, the wind and the snow seem to indicate beyond doubt that winter is here. On the bright side of things, if winter is here, Christmas can’t be that far. Time to get merry!