Whatever happened to global warming?
Perhaps its time to change the lyrics of the song “Feelings,” to “Freezing, everything is frozen,” or something like that.
What happened to make Father Winter this mad? The temperature this morning was near minus 40C (for those of you that are still metrically challenged, that’s about the same in Fahrenheit), and that was before adding the wind-chill factor, making it minus 45C.
As we say in Norwegian, “hutte meg tu. Det var kaldt gitt.” (Oh my, Oh my. That was cold).
Mother Nature and Father Winter must have had a spat. He lost the fight and got very angry. He should have known better than to go to war against a female. Case in point – Argentina vs. Margaret Thatcher over Falkland Islands.
However, Father Winter shouldn’t take it out on us poor earthlings. I mean he should rather direct the freezing to that famous nether place filled with lawyers, bankers and politicians, and make sure it freezes over. That way the Toronto Maple Leafs will have a chance of winning the Stanley Cup.
The good thing about this weather is that we don’t need the air conditioner blasting away in the house, but we have to roll up the windows in the truck. When outside, my hearing problem becomes mute, because whatever Marion says to me gets frozen in the air. I just have to grab the sentences and read them.
A sneeze just drops frozen to the ground, as does a fart. The negative side of this is that my breath freezes in my mustache. I don’t dare wiping it in fear of it breaking off, and Marion refuses to kiss me.
I suppose with these kind of cold temperatures, a lot of people grab some free time or holidays and travel to warmer climates, while the rest of us try to cope with the cold weather and work hard at not getting cabin fever.
Cabin fever, as you may know, is descriptive of a feeling of paranoia for being stuck inside, combined with an urge to severely injure the weatherman. The weatherman you say? Yep, Trump would refer to it as fake news and switch to a weather forecaster instead.
This cold weather reminds me of an almost true story.
Hans was a gifted student, who had enrolled on a scholarship in a fancy private school. It was a bitterly cold day, and Hans was all bundled up with a heavy parka, warm snow boots, a wool toque, scarf and warm mittens, trudging his way through the snow heading home from school.
A car pulled up along side of Hans. The driver lowered the window looked at Hans and said, “Come on boy, get out of the cold and into my car.”
“No thank you,” replied Hans.
“I’ll give you 50 dollars if you get into my car,” said the driver while holding up the money.
“No way,” said Hans.
“OK, 100 dollars. Now come on into my car,” said the driver.
“I’ve told you many times dad, that you cannot bribe me to get me into your lousy little VW,” said Hans.
I recall from early childhood when my twin brother Kjell and I wanted to go out and
play in the snow with the other kids, especially with Grete, our next-door neighbour and our girlfriend. Our mother would dress us in layers, starting with the itchy wool underwear, and I mean itchy.
We were sternly warned not to scratch ourselves in a certain area in public, so we did a scratch transfer to the outside of the leg, or just ran around the corner to take care of the itch. Multiple sweaters were topped off with one-piece jump suits. We were so hard packed that we could hardly move, and our arms were straight out to the sides.
Mom always asked us before starting to dress us if we had to go to the bathroom first. We never did. However, because it took so long to get us dressed, we started jumping from one foot to the other, declaring in panic that we had to go to the bathroom right now.
Off with all the layers, and then after we had relieved ourselves, she dressed us again, sent us out and flopped exhausted into her comfy chair.
It was a bitterly cold day, and Lena was driving through Saskatoon on her way from
Biggar to Humboldt.
She was on Circle Drive behind a dump truck. She noticed that some of the cargo the truck was hauling kept leaking out while the truck was moving. As a concerned driver, she thought it was her duty to let the trucker know.
When the truck stopped at the next intersection, Lena got out of her car and ran up to the truck driver, just before the truck started moving again. She waved her arms at him, made him roll down the window and said,
“Hi, my name is Lena, and you seem to be losing some of your cargo.”
The trucker smiled and waved at her, and kept on driving. Lena ran back to her car and kept following the trucker. She repeated her performance at the next intersection, and again at the intersection after that. The trucker finally pulled into a parking lot, got out of the truck and waited for Lena.
“I’m glad you stopped, you’ve been losing a lot of you load,” said Lena.
“My name is Bob, and because it is winter and we have icy road conditions, I’m sanding the roads,” said the trucker.
