Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Cold snap breaks

I don't want to do much of anything during a cold snap, and we FINALLY had a proper one these last couple of weeks. It was hilarious, listening to the radio telling us every couple of days, "Oh, the weather is supposed to get warmer tomorrow, the ice fog should lift by this afternoon...." and then the weather would get even colder, growling at us from its frozen lair. People forget what a cold snap is. It's not this two- or three-day dip into hot-coffee-evaporating bitterness that we've been subject to for the last several winters. That is not a proper Interior cold snap. That's a chilly blink.

A cold snap lasts for weeks, and gets deeper and colder and nastier as it goes along. Floods and fires start wiping out people's houses. We've had at least two friends with frozen houses and our pipes almost froze, and of course there's been the two major house fires in the village. Another person (with a dry cabin) is out of town right now, but he's going to come home to a lot of frozen-and-then-thawed beer and canned goods...messy.

The breeze on my face as I got out of the car this morning felt warm and chinook-like. T-shirt weather! I felt hot and sweaty in my parka....

2 comments:

Alaskan Dave Down Under said...

When I left the Interior in September of '00 I did follow the winter temps... It seems that once I left the winter temps were warmer. Now that I'm in touch with some alaskan bloggers, it seems the winter weather has gone back to normal, ie F*CKING COLD.

So perhaps I can take some sort of perverse credit for y'alls first "real" winter since I left!

:)

LOL

*giggle*

rainywalker said...

My son in Fairbanks just said the Chinook wind was blowing in town. Breakout the lawn chairs for a little while!