I'm pretty sure they invented "wind chill" here. We had it in Minneapolis, but here it takes on another meaning entirely. I have a thermometer suction-cupped to the window outside my kitchen, and it reads 32, but I was outside a little while ago getting a book out of the Honda, and it felt subzero. I should watch the news and find out what they think the wind chill is. It's nasty, whatever it is.
A few years ago, probably 1994, I guess, there was one January where it was just incredibly cold. One night it was 25 degrees below zero up at O'Hare, and everything acted strange. My ice scraper shattered. The tires on the car stuck to the pavement and then they rolled funny, apparently because they had frozen into out-of-roundness and had to be driven for miles to stop thumping. I couldn't get money from the cash machine because the little display couldn't function because of the cold. At least the Honda started. A guy I dated for a while during that winter wasn't able to get his car started for six days. He ended up paying almost one hundred fifty dollars to have someone tow his car out to Hoffman Estates, where his parents had a heated garage. THat was the sort of guy Jonathan was. It would have been more practical to tow it to a garage or something, or put a hibachi under it (which my father did once with his old station wagon) but no, be wanted to impose on his parents. Had it hauled out there, left it in the garage all day, then started it and drove home.
I've been reading some things on the site at CNN about El Nino (sorry I don't know how to do the little tilde ~ over the N) and what effect it will have on this winter. I don't know that this winter is particularly strange so far, but I'm somewhat convinced that it will turn out to be excessive in some way. I've laid in a supply of bags of rock salt and kitty litter (which I have to buy anyway), put a snow shovel and gloves and flares and other things in the Honda, and bought extra food and a battery-operated fluorescent light for the apartment. One trick I learned in Minnesota which I'll pass along: go to a floor covering store and buy a few chunks of carpet. Sometimes they'll sell you the 2x3-foot carpet sample mats, and the reason you want these is that they give you very good traction and can be picked up and thrown down anywhere you might be on ice. A few years ago I was one of the few people who could get out of their parking space after a minor ice storm, because I tossed a couple of carpet scraps under the front tires and made a path to the salted part of the street. Simple tricks sometimes work the best.
I made a really nice quiche earlier. It's wasteful, because I never finish the whole thing and they don't reheat well after a couple of days, but I wanted it, I made it, I gave Fargo a little piece, and the household smells good. Welcome to Sunday night.