Artic Blast

I’m pretty sure…I think I am. I think I saw four snowflakes blowing across the tundra – uh, the pavement in downtown Houston. Doubt me? I have independent verification.

“This is stupid…but I think I saw a snowflake.” That’s what he said.

But then here comes science to put a damper on faith and belief in the goodness of things. “Bullshit!” the pseudo-scientist said. “It is nowhere cold enough to snow!” We need to work on his grammar.

I kept looking if for no other reason than to prove him wrong.

I’ve was looking forward to yesterday – the day of the Artic Cold Front. Actually this forecast was upgraded by the forecasters yesterday on Channel 11. “The Artic Blast will hit around 9:00 a.m. causing temperatures to plummet.” Artic Blast. I like that better than Artic Cold Front. The term ‘blast’ was apropos. At 9:00 a.m. yesterday temperatures did indeed plummet, accompanied by high winds. In Canada those winds would probably be classified as a delicate breeze. In Kansas they would have been called a ‘wind’. Down here they were called a “friggin’ force-5 hurricane’. Downtown people were nudging themselves around light poles to keep from being blown around.

This windy stuff contributed to something – and I don’t want to get to technical here – called ‘wind chill’. It was thirty-eight degrees at 4:00 yesterday afternoon, and with the wind it felt like approximately minus 762-degrees. For my Canadian friends, this is below 0-degrees Celsius. Today is better. The wind has died down. My car thermometer kept bouncing back and forth between 32 and 33-degrees. I could imagine my car whispering to itself, “I’m freezing. I’m not. I’m freezing.  I’m not.”

And as I drove in to my half-day work this morning, I considered those football players that wear short-sleeved jerseys while playing in frigid weather. Part of it is to show how tough they are. I once heard a player say that it was invigorating. As I thought about this during my drive, I figured that I needed some invigoration. So I rolled down my window and let the 32/33-degree weather whip across me. I wanted to experience what those football players felt. It only took 90-seconds for me to become Really Invigorated. But I think that I now have bonded with them.

Speaking of bonding, I’ve written my congressman. I think that we need to become closer to our Canadian friends – share experiences a little. So I suggested that we pass a law to adopt the really-weird Celsius temperature thing in the summer, but keep our old fashioned Fahrenheit in the winter. Think about it. If it is 85-degree Fahrenheit, to a Canadian it is only 29-degrees. If we realized that it was only 29, we wouldn’t feel damn hot. I haven’t heard back from him.

But being Artic Blasted provided me with the perfect excuse to have a bowl of chili for lunch. Someone told me that the chili at Jason’s Deli was pretty good – so I tried it and it was pretty good.

Actually I wrote this a while back during one of our cold fronts, but never got around to publishing it. Today, February 18th, it is 60-degrees and it has been raining a lot. I just needed to remind myself that sometimes in winter it actually does gets cold here.