By Dan Irvin
The forecasts have maintained that our arctic snap is going to break a little bit today; welcome relief!
Anyone who’s lived around these parts for a year or more knows that the bitter cold is very much a part of the equation.
Like the boy A Christmas Story, at the age of six the storm door at our back entrance seduced me on a cold winter day and I stuck my tongue there. My father rescued me by jerking my head away from the door. A couple layers of tongue remained.
In college one Fall, I noticed that my dog outside playing with some cotton candy-like stuff off the house. It took the first sub-zero night and a plumber to tell me my pipes were frozen because somebody had pulled the insulation away. The mutt acted like she didn’t know what we were on about.
A New Jersey Christmas morning in the double digits below zero: my car would start, for the trip home to Illinois, but wouldn’t rev when I put my foot on the accelerator. I called my dad, as you do, and he told me diesel cars have a fuel-gelling problem when the temperature descends into the abyss. I would have to add a little kerosene to the fuel mix. After searching and somehow finding kerosene at a store….on Christmas morning….we got the car to run about 30 miles an hour until maybe 25 miles down the New Jersey turnpike the condition corrected itself.
Everybody has their winter window condensation story. We had a child in the hospital overnight; a kid always gets sick when the weather is frigid. When we got home, we found that the kitchen window condensation had formed and frozen so badly that it engulfed a full souvenir bottle of Mexican Pepsi Cola sitting on the windowsill.
My boss says nobody cares how goofy your big coat or hat look, as long as you can say they’re warm.
Stay warm.
Dan Irvin is Vice-President of the Bloomington Public Library Foundation Board, and a member of the Heartland Community College Foundation Board.
The opinions expressed within WJBC’s Forum are solely those of the Forum’s author, and are not necessarily those of WJBC or Cumulus Media, Inc.
