You Know It's Cold When...

A day or two after Christmas (I'm too tired right now to do the research to verify these dates and exact temperatures), our temperatures dropped... and dropped... and kept on dropping. We hit -20 degrees and we thought we were going to die. This happened last winter, too (at the end of January) but if I recall correctly, it only lasted for a few days. So when I saw it happening again, I felt cold, but I wasn't too worried about it. Well, the low temperatures lasted throughout the whole Christmas break. On New Year's Eve, I took a picture of the thermometer in our car reading -22 degrees. That was the lowest I'd personally seen since living in Alaska. Now my camera is broken (thanks to my little Ziya) and I have not been able to snap more pictures (like when I dropped Ammon off for school today and it was -32 degrees). We're three days back into school and we have not warmed up one single bit. As a matter of fact, the last two or three days have only gotten progressively colder. I'm hesitant to say this (again, because I'm too lazy to verify any of it), but I don't believe we've hit anything above about -15 degrees since those days after Christmas. AT LEAST IT FEELS THAT WAY!!!

Thus, the title of this post:
YOU KNOW IT'S COLD WHEN...

• My little die-hard outside player, Ammon, only lasts about 2 minutes each time he insists on playing on his hill (which is really the huge snow pile that the plow has made from our parking lot snow). The two or three times he has attempted, he comes in very bravely stating, "I just can't do it. It's waaaayyy too cold!"
• You start to wish that it would warm up to at least zero degrees.
• Any and all moisture in your nose immediately freezes when you step outside. This is gross, I know, but it's very, very true! You just take a step outside, do a little sniffle and for a second or two, your nostrils stick to each other. And I won't even go into the details about talking to somebody outside for a while and having to look at the frozen booger hanging off their nose the whole time.
  
• Speaking of standing outside talking for a while... you have a hard time forming words after just a few minutes. It's like your face wants to freeze into just one position and all the mouth and facial movement that conversation requires becomes increasingly more difficult the longer you stand outside.
  
• You spend more gasoline warming up your car than you do going wherever you have to go. As a matter of fact, after only about a week or so, our Suburban is running near empty... and I haven't gone anywhere... AT ALL (just school, the store, church... all within about two miles of where we live!).
  
• Church is truncated to just one hour, Sacrament meeting. The rest of the meetings are canceled because the furnace pooped out and half of the building is freezing cold.
  
• You can't see a face on the noble crossing guard at Ammon's school. He is covered from head to toe in arctic gear. I'm surprised he can see well enough to know when there's a kid waiting to cross!
• The home teachers are given a special assignment to call all of their assigned families to make sure that they are warm enough.
  
• Schools don't let the kids out for recess. I think the district's weather policy is that if it's lower than -10 degrees, the kids have to stay indoors. Do you realize what this means? You just spent two straight vacation weeks indoors and your kid is dying to get back to school for recess... only to find that there is none! I don't know how the teachers do it! I don't know how I'm going to do it if this keeps up for too much longer. Talk about CABIN FEVER!!!
  
• You burn your fingers opening a door without a glove on. It's the weirdest sensation. It burned for about 1/2 hour when all I did was touch the door knob for about 2 seconds.
  
• You have to plug in your car to keep the engine from freezing. A neighbor who went away for the holiday season left her car unplugged. It wouldn't start when she got back so she had to plug it in for two days straight before it would start.
  
• Your four and six year old children have a perfect understanding of negative numbers. About a month ago, when we tried to introduce the concept to Ammon for his homework, he was very, very confused. Now he gets it... EASILY!
  
• Some water pipes in the apartment building froze. Our life-saver maintenance hero purchased some space heaters to try to thaw them out (mind you, these are for rooms that are already heated!). A few hours later, the parking lot was converted into an ice-skating rink as the pipe burst and water gushed everywhere, immediately freezing, of course. The entire building's water had to be shut off while the necessary repairs were made. Now the new space heaters are staying on round the clock. We're still crossing our fingers!
  
• I heard on the radio (a few days ago) that the last time Anchorage temperatures stayed below 0 degrees for more than 14 consecutive days was in 1917. I can't wait to hear what kind of records Kenai is breaking... especially since I'm pretty sure we're significantly colder than Anchorage is right now.
  
• Your friends start writing posts like this one entitled "Drastic Temperatures Call for Drastic Measures." (They're escaping to Hawaii... luuuccckkkyyy!)
• You spend 20 minutes of your precious time just to write a post about how cold it is.
  

I could probably go on and on (and I may add more to this post after I lie down for the night and think about it some more). The point is, it was -32 degrees when I dropped Ammon off for school this morning. That is 64 degrees below freezing! We are supposedly going to warm up tomorrow or the next day - all the way to 18 degrees above zero. I'm not going to believe it until I see it though. A 50 degree change in just one or two days is kind of hard to believe.

If you can't tell, I'm just a tad bit FED UP!!! If I were a cussing woman, I would probably cuss.