Oh, the house is feeling small and cold today. Damn those budgets.... It would probably help if I could figure out how to use the electric storage heaters in all the rooms. As is, I'm stuck huddling in the living room in front of the gas fire, which eats oxygen and, no doubt, contributes to my feelings of claustrophobia.

On the good side, I have done an hour of thesis work so far today--reading about very freaky reactionary political clampdowns at the end of the Austrian Enlightenment, when free speech was abruptly suppressed (in the name of national security) and the Minister of Police (referred to as "sinister" in almost every book on the period, as in "the sinister Count Pergen") was given the freedom to arrest people and hold them without charges, for indefinite periods of time. All very disturbing stuff, especially since it followed ten or fifteen years of freedom of the press and radical public philosophizing. Especially since history so often repeats itself....

Oh well. I've got macaroni and cheese baking in the oven, which is always deeply cheering.