Brrrrr -- It's cold!
So, I don't know how it is where you live, but I thought I'd write up a bit about how it is here. It's cold! It's been cold for a couple weeks. The winter started off pretty mild and we still haven't got much snow, but what he have had is sure as hell going to stick around! This is what our least week of temperatures has looked like at my house:
There's a trailer parked right outside my office, so the vista is somewhat ugly, but it's a good portrayal of what things look like. There's snow made of crunchy ice-crystals with ice and black-ice stuck to the roads.
Here in the suburbs, there's often a stand of woods between one industrial complex and the next, so these are just east of the plant where I work. There's something about the nature of the light that just says cold to me.
And if you need any reassurance, here's our storm-door. That ice is on the inside! It's too cold outside for enough moisture in the air to fall out like that. But inside, it's toasty-warm (if a little drafty) and the water we exhale loves to ice-up on the inside of our windows. Sometimes we have to scrape it like our car-windows to clear it off.
Anyway, that's what's new this week in my life.
Hey, I'll append a little story from when we first moved to Minnesota in the fall of 2004! See, everyone told us we were nuts to move somewhere so cold. Of course, we hated living in hot summery places, so we knew they just had different preferences. But so, we moved right before winter and it got cold. And eventually it dipped below zero (in degrees F, I mean -- that's -18 C!) and Cathy and I went out on the deck in our T-shirts and sort of danced around, reveling in the cold. And then we went back in to warm up. I told "we're *real* Minnesotans now!" just joking around, but it was fun. And then it stayed below zero. For a week. It was colder that week than this last one that I charted above. And I have to tell you, we weren't really dancing around enjoying it at that point. It was sort of fatiguing. We're more or less used to it now, but it's fun to look back when we were green n00bs.
Our dogs water bowl froze in the laundry-room and the pipes burst! Very cold!
Ouch; burst pipes are the worst! The drain from our main tub/shower froze up yesterday morning and I had to set up a heater in our tuck-under garage to thaw them and drain the tub, but nothing burst.
I'm glad nothing burst! It's pretty awful, but if you ever have to deal with a burst pipe there is a new product called "pex" it's like pvc but designed for high pressure and high temperatures it pairs with these new connections called "Sharkbite Connector" It's really quite amazing stuff and makes repairing a pipe a breeze no soldering, just cut out the burst section, cut a piece of pex pipe and connect, seals perfectly once clicked into place.
Wow...i bet if i ever go to Minnesota i would be a noob myself, ive never seen or touch real snow in my life before, haha.
Happy New Year and Happy Holidays! :D
A little bird told me that all 50 states hit sub-freezing temperatures today. It's not just you!
Monday the HIGH in Minnesota was -1F, and the low Tuesday was -11F!! I'd say it's definitely just them.
;-)