It is 0 degrees outside on the bench and with extreme cold comes the usual things that start fires, such as Monday's incident in Indian Hills of thawing pipes with a propane torch. Other favorites of the season are candles left burning and ashes from fireplaces scooped up and placed in paper bags and then left on the wooden deck.
No one was seriously hurt in Monday's fire which was lucky given the circumstances. We're only looking at a couple of days of sub-zero weather in parts of the Valley, so let's be careful out there. The Christmas you save may be your own.
A meeting on the $24.7 million redevelopment deal in the north county will be at 5 p.m. Thursday. Earlier reports were that it would be at 4 p.m. County commissioners will be holding their regular meeting at Stateline that day and then coming down for redevelopment. The county commissioners serve as the board of the redevelopment district.
The National Weather Service has cranked up the possibility for precipitation on Thursday up to 50 percent. I still wouldn't bet those odds in the casino, but at least the weather should warm up a little bit over the next two days. This morning's low hit zero as predicted. The low early Wednesday morning should warm up all the way to 6. When the storm rolls in on Wednesday night, the low will climb back up into double digits and the daytime high will hit 42, perfect for working on that mid-winter tan.
I got a phone call from a reporter in Colorado who is doing a story about how similar Douglas County's Web site is to the Douglas County site in the Centennial State. The site is at www.douglas.co.us, and is pretty darn close to the one the county unveiled a short time ago. It is not unusual for Web sites to copy one another and we could have done much worse. The Colorado site is the winner of a fifth place for Best of the Web and tied for third place in the Digital Counties Survey award for 2006. It might have been better to pick someone higher on the list, like nearby Nevada County, Calif., which took second place in the same population category we're in.
