Bene Diction posted some thoughts on dealing with cold weather. As I sit here listening to Car Talk and drinking chai, I thought I’d list Bene’s ways and add my comments to them.
1.) We know not to touch metal like a car door handle with bare hands. (Darn straight. Owwwwww…)
2.) We breathe through wool or fur, so we don’t damage our lungs. Woven wool is amazing stuff. The wetter it gets, the warmer it gets next to your nose and mouth. (I heart my wool scarves. My polar fleece one isn’t too bad either though wool is definitely the best.)
3.) We learn to keep kleenex in our pockets. Stepping from that kind of cold to warm starts major sniffles and nasal drip. (You just have a perpetual case of the sniffles. Then you go into a house and all that snot dries in your nose. It’s ummmm… interesting.)
4.) We layer. (You just don’t go out without wearing thermal underwear under your clothes. Otherwise, the cold literally does chill you to the bone. I also found that Jon’s long black raincoat [for his suit] is a lovely thing — it seals in the warmth and makes me look either really Gothic or really British.)
5.) We learn that all the neat gadgets we’ve developed don’t always work. If you plugged in the car, and it isn’t starting, and it gets towed to the garage to get thawed out, c’est la vie. (Block heaters are wonderful things, but you pretty much have to count on starting your car at least 5-10 minutes before you go anywhere when it’s -25F.)
6.) We watch the weather channel. A lot. We have weather channel groupies. (Dude… the Weather Channel is my friend. I watch it if there’s nothing else on.)
7.) We go to Tim Hortons with our friends and complain and commiserate. Loudly and raucously. We openly envy our ‘snowbird’ buddies. We have immediate friends in total strangers. “Cold eh?” starts great conversations. (In Minnesota, everyone is nice and everyone loves to talk about the weather. Everyone loves to drink coffee too. If only we had a Timmies in my town.)
8.) We sleep a lot. Like any extreme cold saps your strength. Winter sun doesn’t give the vital nutrients our bodies need. It wouldn’t anyway, we are too bundled up against the wind. Seasonal affective disorder is real. (So it’s actually normal that I can’t get myself up willingly before 10? Cool! This should save me money on seretonin and anti-depressants.)
9.) We help each other out. This is a vast country with vast arctic air cold systems. We don’t conquer nature. All it takes is living outside an urban area for awhile to appreciate our inter-dependency. (If you stop by anyone’s house to drop something off, you always stay for a cup of coffee. If they like you, they’ll give you more.)
Some things that Bene didn’t mention:
When it gets below about 20F, people start using expletives to describe how cold it is. More explatives = more cold. Anything between 10 and 20 F is “very cold”. Anything from -5 to 10 is “Christ it’s very cold”. Anything from -5 to -15 is “Christ it’s very frickin’ cold”. You get the picture.
You need an ice scraper for the insides of your car windows. We get frozen water on the insides of the windows of our Volvo. It would be pretty if it wasn’t so cold.
That “wind that sweeps down the plains” is really a wind that rips your face off and sucks any heat from your body. If you have a hood, you have your face shield up. If you have a scarf, it’s covering everything but your eyes. The longer the coat, the better.
It’s actually 30F today — 55 degrees warmer than Monday. Maybe I’ll go frolic outside and revel in my ability to just walk around in shirt sleeves.
