立冬

And so today is 立冬, the start of winter. After a week of obssessively bleeding radiators to try and encourage hot water to come through the pipes, only for cold water to drip out, we seem to have some heat.

Well, not so much “heat” as “not cold”. Still, it’s enough that the temperature inside our apartment climbed to 17 degrees last night, and 18 degrees by the time I got up this morning. It’s amazing how much of a difference those precious few degrees of warmth make. Waking up to 15 degrees was chilly, prompting me to crank up the aircon so we could start the day warm. Going to bed at 16 degrees had us shivering and huddling together to try and get warm. And as our radiators get less and less “not cold” and more and more “actually quite warm”, perhaps the situation will continue to improve.

But based on last winter’s experience, another cold snap will have us back down to 16 degrees pretty quickly.

Waking up, I looked at my cellphone. Twentysomething past six. Surely not, it’s still pitch dark outside! I snuck a peak out the window. Aha:

Lack of wind + the city’s central heating boilers firing up (many of which still burn coal) = ever thickening haze.

Understood. The sky did slowly, weakly lighten as the sun tried to penetrate the haze.

Curious: Yesterday saw a veritable torrent of hits to this blog coming from one particular American IP address. These hits are listed as “feeds” and have lead to an utterly absurd spike in the stats. The IP address in question seems to be connected to this page, which I can’t open (indeed, other links from what seems to be the site’s main page also behave as if they’re GFW’d). The torrent seems to be continuing this morning. I can’t see anything objectionable about that site, I’m just kinda curious as to what is causing this sudden surge in the stats.