It's sunny and in the mid 20s here. It's supposed to go down to 9 degrees overnight tonight. North and west of here in the higher elevations it goes below zero at night. I'm glad we live in a valley. As it is I have to add water to the boiler once during the day and then again at bedtime when it gets this cold. Some of the steam is always lost out the chimney, but a certain amount of the water always stays in the radiators and doesn't trickle back down to the furnace until it warms up outside.

I brought my car to the service station earlier and they adjusted it so the engine doesn't race at a too high idle with this cold weather. Otherwise it's just a home day taking caring of the usual chores. I'm still a bit tired and achy from all the shoveling Monday. I had a hard time backing the car out of its space in front of the house to go to PT yesterday. There was ice on the street underneath the car, so when I came home I parked across the street and broke all the ice up with the ice chopper and put down ice melt before I moved the car back, so it's much better today. The outside of the car is dirty with snow scum residue from snow combined with the road salt. It's really noticable on a navy blue car. The poor thing needs a trip to the car wash some time soon. If only we would get a middle of the winter thaw with a day where it got close to 60 degrees so I could just wash it myself.

But so far no real January thaw this year. It may hit 40 degrees Sunday and maybe one day next week, but that's it. The normal high for this time of year is 38-40 degrees to begin with. We've just been below normal much of the time, so a normal day seems especially mild, but we've had no real chance to thaw out for any long period with the frequent cold snaps. I'm ready for spring. I'm tired of winter. I want to think about growing spring flowers from seeds and see the snow drops pop up.

Tomorrow is PT, then a trip to Petco and the supermarket. Maybe on Friday I'll go to IKEA. I have $10 birthday money this month from them, plus go back to Joann's arts and crafts since I have coupons. I see Joann's filed for bankruptcy and are looking for a new owner to sell the chain to. Underperforming stores around the country are closing but none here in NJ. I go to the one in the big shopping mecca in Paramus, right next to one of the shopping malls there.

On the weekend I should stop by Kohl's. I have Kohl's yes to you rewards cash, $5 in birthday money from them, plus I still have plenty of money on my gift card I got for Christmas. I'll see what they have for their late winter/early spring clothing choices. Kohl's has a new CEO and the hope is he will undo some of the bad changes made by the past CEO and go back to focusing more on their clothing lines and jewelry, and focus less on selling home decor, small appliances, and the Sephora stuff. I hate that my closest Kohl's took the entire bedding and towels department over to remake it into a huge small appliances department and shoved the bedding and towels into a small crowded section against a wall. They added one of those mini Buy Buy Baby sections with infant car seats and overpriced baby gear. They wasted space on the Under Armor clothing section so the Tek Gear clothes were shoved in a corner and the Croft and Barrow clothes are jammed in next to the nightclothes and robes. They stopped having a petites section in-stores and only offer petite clothing online. Their old CEO made so many bad decisions for the stores. Hopefully this new guy will undo them all. I've read customers are emailing him asking him to make the stores go back to the way they used to be. I want them to bring the Apartment 9, Elle, and Dana Buchman lines back and quit only having the Vera Wang stuff on their website. They need to bring their jewelry department back into the stores. It was nice being able to buy a pair or two of cute earrings every so often.