The Polar Plunge

Oh the weather outside is frightful,

but the fire is so delightful.

Thanks to what the weather guy calls a "polar plunge" we went from summer to winter in the course of about an hour. On Monday morning, I opened windows in the house because it was so pleasant out. When I answered the FedEx guy's knock at about 11:00 A.M., however, I registered that he was bundled up to the eyebrows a split second before a blast of icy air nearly knocked me off my feet. A few minutes later it started snowing and didn't stop for three days.

Considering how long it snowed, we didn't end up with that much accumulation. The flakes were always small, but they didn't stop, and we ended up with about a foot. Last night the snow finally tapered off, and this morning it is sunny, but since the mercury is registering only 3 degrees, there's not much melting going on. 

Unsurprisingly, I had the sidewalk to myself.

The low last night was supposedly negative 8 (I'm happy to say that I, wearing fleece pajamas and tucked in bed, cannot confirm this) and during our "plunge" phase it was getting up to only about 5 degrees during the day. Certainly colder than usual for this part of the country. Colder, too, than NYC, but I braved the cold on foot twice anyway, once walking to our gym (about 15 minutes) and once to my piano teacher's house (about 20 minutes). Bundled up, I was actually very comfortable as long as I walked quickly. The snow was powdery and bone dry, unlike the slush I was used to trudging through in New York, so I didn't end up with wet feet. (Most people don't use salt here for environmental reasons, so while sidewalks were very much covered with snow it was light and about the texture of flour. Easy to walk in.) I saw a few people shoveling their driveways, a few dog-walkers, and some children with very red cheeks, but otherwise there weren't too many people out. I like walking, though, and I figured that the time it takes to get my car de-iced and warmed up was pretty comparable to the time it would take me to walk to places close to my house. I spotted a buck walking serenely through someone's yard just a few yards away from me, making it all worth it; I wouldn't have been able to admire him as well from a car (if I'd seen him at all) or listen to the soft pfft of his hooves as they landed neatly in the snow.

Driving hasn't been bad either as long as I go slowly, though scraping off the car is a pain. The first time I tried to drive, we hadn't yet bought scrapers and there was too much ice for a credit card to be a substitute. Ed ended up microwaving a pitcher of water and pouring it all over my windshield, which did the trick nicely.

Our first fire was also an adventure, but after figuring out the flue's functioning under slight, smoky duress, things went well. It was short-lived, however, as we didn't have much wood and burned through our supply pretty quickly. Still it increased our coziness factor exponentially.

The birds have been plundering our feeders each morning. They don't seem bothered by the snow, and neither do the squirrels. Todd, however, is not a fan, though it's tough to say whether he objected to the harness or to the weather. Ed said that in Reno, Todd bounded through the snow, tunneling into drifts. On Wednesday, though, he plopped down on the porch for about three seconds, then bolted back inside and refused to come out again. Not everyone is a fan of our sudden winter.