-24F. I'm putting off a grocery run so I can do it in the worst cold available.
chas wrote:I heard on NPR that school is canceled in Minneapolis because of the cold. You KNOW it's cold when that happens.
Not just Minneapolis, but all over. When I was a kid (here it comes, they groan) in North Dakota, I remember waiting for the school bus one day when it was -50F. Seriously. That's not wind chill. We spat in the air to see if it would crack before it hit the ground (it didn't; I think it has to be -70F for that). The air was very still, and the smoke from every chimney was flowing
downward. That was an uncanny sight. Looking back it seems pretty stupid, but back then it just never seemed to occur to anybody that a day off might be the sensible thing to do. No idea why; maybe it was the rationale that if the Postal Service was running, everyone else should too. You just bundled up until you couldn't move, and soldiered on. Even though I survived all that very well, I think that "We were tougher in those days" is a reckless thing to say; a foolhardy adult is one thing, but our kids are quite another. Nowadays, leaving kids out in dangerous cold is unthinkable without at least some kind of plan, and even then I wouldn't want to do it. Sure, I'd want my kids to be tough, but there are better ways to go about it. Some people call that coddling - we only used to call off school if the snows made driving an obviously bad idea - but I think closing schools for the cold as well is just a case of common sense finally dawning on us: Playing outdoors in weather like that is fine if you're dressed for it and can take it, because you can quickly run inside to warm up; but if a bus broke down on an empty stretch you might end up with a lot of dead kids, and what is all your tough-it-out bravado worth then?
"If you take music out of this world, you will have nothing but a ball of fire." - Balochi musician