My Hometown is Gone

This morning, I went to check something on my Mac OS X dashboard, which contains several weather widgets for various locations that I care about. One of them is my hometown, Morganton, where my parents still live. So you can imagine my horror when a javascript malfunction in the widget code produced these values1:

Without a moment's hesitation, I immediately fired off a worried email to my parents, asking if they were okay. My father quickly wrote back:

We are doing OK. We have had to burn most of the furniture to keep warm, and of course, we cannot go outside at all. We are down to one dog now, and it is just the little one, but we are hopeful the weather will break in time for truckers to resume serving this area. Thawing ice for drinking water is probably our biggest concern right now, as we are having to use body heat for that.

How are things in Spain?

Brilliant.

1NaN stands for "not a number", and is what javascript gives you when you perform an illegal arithmetic computation, such as dividing by zero.