Ho hum. This has not been a productive morning.

Start off with a dentist's appointment (nothing particularly awful, just a routine checkup, but still not actually fun), and continue with me getting in to work to discover my PC has managed to do something outstandingly painful to itself and won't boot. Do a little dance with a disk repair utility for about an hour, finally manage to log in, spend the next hour reading incomprehensible email. Finally just about ready to do some actual work, and it's lunchtime. Sigh.

In other news, the Curious Case of the Confusingly Chilled Cucumber is solved. A special anonymous mention to the Mono user who suggested that perhaps this phenomenon was the origin of the phrase ‘cool as a cucumber’ :-) But mainly thanks to antinomy for suggesting what turned out to be the answer: it wasn't that the cucumber water froze at more than zero, it was that the milk froze at less, and my fridge is just below freezing. I put a mug of plain water in the fridge and it froze as well. Case solved.