I swear if I see one more person complaining about 20 degrees, or worse 40 degrees, I may lose my cool. (Pun intended) The windchills for the past week have been hovering around -30 here in MN. The sun has been out, because yeah - it's too damn cold even for snow. But if you have never felt a cold useless sun before, come visit MN. The sun is doing very little right now to warm us here and it isn't up for long enough to do much good anyway. We are Minnesotans, we are used to cold snaps, but this one has gone on, for what seems like, forever.
And for all the people who wonder why we can't just stay inside when it is cold so who cares anyway. Yeah - that only works if you're a hermit and never need to leave for any reason. Let's talk about what -30 means for real life people.
1. Doing chores, even if you can somehow manage to run through them in under half an hour, means stopping in your car - that you leave running- to warm up your fingers and toes and the tiny little portion of your face visible to the elements. Oh and don't think that we aren't wearing gloves. In 10 minutes, even with gloves (or two pair) and hand warmers and wool socks - you start to lose feeling in those suckers. Threads on social media in Minnesota are centered around topics like "What kinds of gloves actually work?" or "Are there any boots that keep your feet warm right now?".
2. Speaking of chores - everything freezes. Literally everything. Water buckets freeze solid which requires banging on them or bringing them into somewhere warm to heat up enough to slide out giant blocks of ice. Banging on them tends to result in broken buckets - so there starts to be piles of those. Water heaters fail and stock tanks freeze solid. (Yeah, that's fun.) Even spring fed creeks freeze so you go out with your axe, pitchfork and other assorted tools to bust it open. Sometimes the cops even stop by and question you when your pasture backs up to the city because he thinks you're a hoodlum out hiding behind the buildings smoking pot or something. (Right Libby?)
Horses get cold so there is blanketing and taking off blankets and ripped blankets and buying blankets and dirty blankets and freaking blankets....
Latches, hooks and doors freeze, like solid. So you blow on them, wrap them in your already freezing hands, push on them, shove on them, bang on them, and yes - curse at them.
3. You cannot get warm. At least I can't. I can't remember the last time I felt really and truly warm. My feet are always cold - even in socks or slippers. I layer and layer and layer some more and still am cold. I will sneak one hand out for a few minutes and then sneak the other one out for a few minutes. Maybe I sit on the other hand in an effort to warm it up. Even at night under blankets, sheets, comforters and quilts, I'm still cold. Hot showers are great, but eventually you have to turn the water off and then... cold.
4. The furnace is always running. Which means the gas bill is always going... up... and up...
5. Cars don't start. And if you're lucky enough that your car does start you have to spend gas and time warming it up before you go anywhere. Oh don't give me the "I saw somewhere that it doesn't hurt your car just to start it up and go". Common sense tells me that is a lie. And if I don't warm up my car before I leave, there is a good chance the interior temperature will not get above zero until I arrive at my destination. I might as well be outside doing chores then. Pretty sure law enforcement frowns on me driving with numb fingers and toes. And for my car without remote start I have to do the mad dash out to start it, then back inside to wait. Does a person get fully dressed before starting the car? Of course not silly! Because then you'd be standing inside, dressed like the Michelan man for 10 minutes waiting for the car to warm up. And who wants to try to take their boots off and put them back on? No one. So you go out in your every day clothes, freeze solid and sprint back in to get dressed. Which brings me to number 6.
6. Getting dressed takes FOREVER... (cue flashback to The Sandlot). One does not just "throw on a jacket" to go anywhere. Getting dressed entails long underwear or leggings/tights under all pants and multiple layers (preferably with Cuddle Duds" on top; don't forget the wool socks. Then scarves, head gear (hats or those oh so cute headbands), gloves or a couple of pairs, snowpants or some type of pant layer over the jeans/leggings, boots and pretty soon you can't move. Oh and if you forgot something and have to take any of that crap off and start over, God forbid, you had better give yourself an extra 10 minutes before you need to be somewhere. At our house we store most of our warm weather gear just outside the door in the garage. This means bringing it in for a few minutes to warm up so every heat vent in the house is warming someone's gear. This can be accomplished WHILE you wait for the car to warm up.
7. It's too cold to do anything or go anywhere and half the stuff is cancelled or closed anyway. You know what that means. Eating. Suddenly in the winter it seems like a good idea to chow your way through a pan of bars or lasagna. One of the things I love to do in the winter when we are froze in, is bake. It's warm with the oven going in the kitchen. But that definitely has a downside. Cookies, pies, puddings, bars, any form of dessert sounds amazing when you can't leave the house.
8. Speaking of not being able to go anywhere, inside recess. Any fellow teachers or people working in education can relate to the horrors that those two words bring. Inside recess = high strung, wild, bouncy kids. And we have days on end of inside recess ahead of us.
I could go on. And yes, I know I sound like a negative whiner. But when the positive side of winter is, "hey, I haven't seen a mosquito in weeks", I guess I'm more of a realist than a whiner. I don't ski, ice skate, ice fish, or snowmobile. So tell me again why I live in this state? A little birdie even told me Alaska, heck the North Pole, was warmer than we were this week. Why? For the love of Pete, why?
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