I’ve been telling everyone that i’m working at home because it’s just too cold, and it is: the wind chill is below zero. I am taking their word for it. I didn’t leave the house yesterday and I won’t be leaving today.
Signs it is cold:
- The weather forecasters are telling us the temperatures at which antifreeze freezes.
- Schools and businesses are closing.
- Only one raccoon ventured out of his den last night.
- The U.S. Mail delivery has stopped in some parts of Missouri. They say Kansas City is still delivering, but I don’t know yet about Saint Louis. I’m fine if they skip it: I don’t want someone to die so I can get the direct-to-trash grocery circular.
- CNN says if I’m outside for five minutes I will get frostbite.
- I saw that there was a layer of ice on the inside of the window frame. I thought at first that perhaps a rubber window gasket had frozen and broken like an O-ring, but what’s actually happened is that the metal window frame is so cold that the interior side is ice cold as well, and the scant humidity in the house has collected into a block of ice in the interior.
What’s awful is that it is worse in Chicago and Minnesota. What’s worse is that some people think that ours is the only hemisphere on the globe and use this as a global “waming” rebuttal.
6 responses to “This Must Be A First”
Meantime, south of the equator, Australia is practically all red on the weather temperature maps, and here in New Zealand the roads are melting, the media are in panic mode and we’re reaching numbers never seen before in our officially temperate country.
This is making me feel a lot better about our mid-20s-to-mid-30s temperatures here. Also glad that I don’t live in Australia or, apparently, also New Zealand – ouch! (New Zealand is usually such a lovely place! Not good for roads to melt, though.)
Sorry about the collective damage to the environment and the reduction in livability in your homes, y’all.
Big Dot – I hope you aren’t climbing any mountains in the heat. I always picture you climbing mountains. Air conditioning can be part of a fitness regime too.
KC – Climate change is coming for you too. But for now I’m glad you and I will both have the same temperature today.
Yes, I think “one round of Bad Weather freakishly missed us” is not grounds for anticipating future security. (And even if we were living in some sort of good weather bubble that was *not* likely to get more droughts, washout floods, and tornadoes with increase in weather extremes, it would still suck because things like food supply are very interconnected and it’s not like we’re all trained and capable subsistence farmers who are successfully supporting ourselves without external trade.)(and also, there is no safe bubble; even areas which are likely to continue to have decent crop-growing weather still depend on insect life [both it not being plague-y and it being pollinate-y] and other factors that may shift substantially)
KC – We live on a globe. Other countries are taking measures to protect against climate change. It shames me.
Some people within this country are taking measures to reduce emissions, etc., but yes: at present, our government is, uh, not doing many things to be proud of on that front.