Yet Another Journal

Nostalgia, DVDs, old movies, television, OTR, fandom, good news and bad, picks, pans,
cute budgie stories, cute terrier stories, and anything else I can think of.


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» Friday, January 16, 2009
Fr 0 zen
It's mighty chilly over Dixie today. Not sure what it actually got down to, but when I checked our thermometer at 9 a.m. it was 19°F. To show you how deep the cold was, for a while the sun was on the sensor outside that provides the thermometer with its temperature. In the summer, when the sensor is in the sun in 85° weather, I have seen it register 102. Having sun on the sensor today made it crawl up merely to 22° and now that the sensor is in the shade again, it has already plummeted a degree.

I'm sure this is positively balmy for Chicago and points north. They did an experiment last night on a Chicago street which they showed on the news: a gentleman from the science museum tossed a vial of boiling water up into the air over a sidewalk. It froze and turned to snowflakes before it even hit the concrete.

Nevertheless, it was so "cold" here that one of the counties canceled school, saying 15° was too cold for the kids to be standing outside waiting for a bus. I had to laugh, remembering the day it was -10 with the wind chill and I had to walk to school anyway. Those who protest, "But you were in Rhode Island; you had clothes for the cold!"—actually, no, we didn't. Since we weren't allowed to wear pants to school back then, I wore a pair of nylons under my knee socks to keep my feet and legs warm, wore my longest skirt (hard because those were the days of miniskirts), and wore my boots instead of my shoes. Under my sweater I put one of my dad's undershirts and I had a knitted vest on over my sweater. Mom wrapped my scarf so one end went down my back and the other covered my chest and I put the collar up on my coat and tied it in place. Even with my hands in gloves I stuck them in my pockets...and was still pretty frigid when I got to school (after a half-hour walk).

It was, incidentally, right after that when the school board decided girls could wear pants to school when it was that cold. :-) (But we had to wear a pants suit, or a dressy pair of pants. No jeans or corduroys. By the next year, even corduroy was acceptable.)

I filled the feeder last night before bed and the birds already have it almost empty. The doves are roosting, with their bodies hunkered down to cover their little toes, on the chairs on the sunny deck rather than in the trees. I put hot water on top of the ice in the water dish, hoping to thaw it, but it's already frozen over.

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