Brrrr

A post for my sister to read while she's in the Caribbean...

A year ago on MLK Day our thermometer hit a then-record -22 degrees. It was the only time before last weekend that the temperature dropped as low as -20, but since then we have hit -20 for 5 straight days with an absolute minimum of -27.5*.



Sometime around noon last Saturday



* - a disclaimer about my home thermometer: somewhere around 0 degrees it freaks out a bit and drops the temperature by about 5 extra degrees. So its important to note that when I talk about the temperature at my house, I’m talking about it in “thermometer units,” as opposed to “degrees Fahrenheit.” There’s a strong correlation between the two, but they’re not equal.

This is one of two things that drive me crazy during the Alaskan winter (the other is waiting for all the snow to finally melt in the spring, once its already warm enough to turn the snow into a sloppy mess). It’s too cold for cross-country skiing - and I don’t just mean that in the sense that you wouldn’t want to. I mean that when the snow is this cold it stops being slippery, so your skis stop gliding and you practically would be better off just walking. It’s way too cold to bike to work (our threshold is -5). It’s too cold to take the dog for a walk because by the time we’re rounding the corner she’ll already be lifting her paws off the ground and trying to get around by a 3-footed hop. It’s too cold for the air to hold much water, so we frequently get ice fogs that block out the sun and frost over everything. It’s even too cold to start a fire normally in the fireplace. The air in the chimney gets so cold that when the flue is opened frigid (and therefore dense) air falls down through the chimney into the house, filling the house with smoke in seconds, unless you preheat the fireplace and chimney. I do this with an electric charcoal starter, which is essentially a big metal heating element (similar in principle to the burner of an electric stove) that I plug in and leave in the fireplace for up to an hour before I can try to build a fire.

All the way up to -17, so Beth decides to head outside with Bella to play in the backyard. I held down the fort... from the inside.

In Beth and my opinion, the way to deal with this weather is to keep a fire going, get the fridge stocked with food and beer, and catch up on our reading. This works for awhile, but at this point I think I can safely say we’re getting a bit stir-crazy. Our long-range forecast says that this pattern might break by next Tuesday, and we can always hope that temperatures might rise just a bit even before then (I mean, even having lows of -10 and highs above zero would be nice). In the meantime, we’ve got a scuba class on Thursday night and a visit from Chris Hein (in town all week for a conference and staying with us for the weekend) to keep us sane distracted.

I'll try to put up some pictures of all our snow sometime in the near future, instead of just whining about the cold, but for now this is all you get!



Okay, you get one other picture. Clearly inspired by our adventures from last November, a local ice sculptor carved this lizard downtown at Town Square Park.