Cold

It's cold outside.  I don't know how cold, exactly, but if Nanticoke was in step with the rest of the region, it was well below zero - Fahrenheit.  That's one of the advantages of the Fahrenheit scale:  below 32 is freezing, but anything above zero falls into the "Well, whaddya want, it's Winter!" category.  Anything below zero falls into the "Holy crap, it's cold!" category.

My pipes didn't freeze.  I took the precaution of turning two taps on to slow trickles.  My kitchen sink has always had a drip that I've never fixed, and in the past I've relied on that to keep the pipes from freezing.  But this year, for the first time since I bought my house in 2006, I took the added precaution of opening up the taps a little.

My car didn't freeze, either.  When I got in it Saturday night to go from my mom's house to my house I noticed that there was ice on the windshield, and it didn't take long to see that the ice was on the inside of the windshield.  That problem hasn't repeated; probably the act of heating up the car and getting in and out has removed enough residual moisture from tracked-in snow that it's not an issue anymore.  But I was nearly out of gas by Sunday morning, and after using my car to make the 1/4 mile commute from my house to church (hey, I didn't want to freeze to death on the way!) I stopped at a local gas station, added a bottle of drygas, and paid a ridiculous amount of money to fill my tank.  A trip yesterday cycled about a gallon and a half of the gas and drygas through the system, and I was fairly confident that my lines wouldn't freeze overnight.  They didn't, though the car was not at all happy about starting this morning.

At times like this it's helpful to think about this past Summer.  I didn't get a lot of stuff done that I wanted to this Summer, in part because of the overtime I was working, and in part because of the brutally hot temperatures we experienced.  A friend and her daughters were in the area for a few weeks, and I had hoped we could get together and go for a walk along the recently renovated River Commons in Wilkes-Barre.  We never did, partly because of scheduling issues, but mostly because it was too dangerously hot to spend that much time outside.

What kind of Summer do we have to look forward to this year?  I'm hoping for a mild one, with adequate rainfall interspersed with dry spells long enough for me to repaint my porch and do some concrete work.  But first we have to get through this Winter.

Damn, it's cold outside.