Cold!

About a week ago, I thought, man, we were told winter was going to start for real in October around here, and while we've had jabs of cold, there's been nothing sustained like I expected. And it's January already! I was thinking of writing a Fargoing entry that said, more or less, Hey! Bring it on!

Well, on it has done been brung. Last Friday brought a high of -9 and a low of -13 while I was out of town. Yesterday was a high of 16, and a low of -12. It's a balmy 17 right now (wind chill of 2), and we're expecting highs in the mid-20s for the next ten days or so. Lows are forecast to be in the single digits – much higher than the Weather Service has actually been reporting these past few days; we'll see who's right.

Here's how the cold snap is affecting things:

• Windshield-washer fluid sprays onto the windshield and freezes there. There's some sort of trick to getting the glass clear, which I manage to do only accidentally and occasionally.
  
  
• The radio knobs in the van are hard to turn.
  
  
• Oh, and yes: The cold seems to have finally killed the alternator in the truck. It breathed its last on the interstate last night with Jen driving, Katie on board, and, fortunately, me just a few minutes away in the van to rescue them. Jen has her nightmares about winter here, but mine was pretty close to family members being stranded at night along a highway. I also have a blizzard nightmare that hasn't presented itself yet.
  
  
• Best of all: the furnace in the house can't quite keep up.* I expected that cold weather would just mean horrendous energy bills as the furnace worked full-time to heat the house. It turns out that full-time isn't quite good enough; the house is running about 8 degrees colder than the thermostat is set. It's still comfortable inside, but I'm wondering what it will look like if we get a string of -20 days.
  

This weather is not hard to walk around in for short periods, though – it's not very windy, and the sun is shining brightly. If you have to get from a car to a school, say, it's not uncomfortable to make the walk with your jacket unzipped.

It's almost time to try the fun cold-physics experiments; if you blow bubbles in the cold, when they pop, they burst into shiny crystals. The kids have seen this; I haven't. The one I'm really looking forward to filming is throwing a bucket of boiling water into the air, and having it all freeze before it hits the ground.

* Edit: Change the filter in the furnace, and you'd be surprised how well it works. Oops. Glad that occurred to me before we froze to death or paid someone to come out and look at it.