Another thing I love:

The Weather Channel.

I have a deep and abiding love for The Weather Channel. When I have bad insomnia, I will get up, curl up in my big chair will all the lights off in the living room, and watch The Weather Channel. There is something lulling about it (at least most of the time, when there aren't hurricanes happening). The pageant of the weather unfolding across the country soothes me - the fact that you can see patterns, that the rain that was in Fargo on Wednesday will be in Chicago on Friday.

I also like their website.

I just learned that it will be very likely snowing when I arrive in Illinois. That's so perfect, so romantic to me - to stand there, the last few miles, on the lower level of the train, the conductor leaning out the window to apprise the engineer of how much farther he must go to stop in a good place to let passengers off, and snowflakes blowing in the window. And getting off in that burst of cold air, and knowing that Now It Is Christmas Again, and being able to sit at home and watch the snow...it makes me happy.

A little thing I admit, with some embarrassment, that I do when I'm bored in my office (like waiting on a meeting or something)? I play what I call "weather.com bingo." I type in a random combination of five numbers in the zip-code box and see what place comes up and what the weather's like there (not all number combinations work; you could, were you a competitive sort, make it a game by weighing "successes" against "failures" when it came to turning up places). For example, 12345 gets you Schenectady, New York. It's silly, but then aren't a lot of the things we do when bored a little silly?