2004-02-16 - 7:24 p.m.

How Cold Is It?

It is so cold that...

...Yesterday I took my car to one of those automatic car washes, mostly because I had all these tokens for it accumulating, and I wanted to start using them up. It was a nice sunny day and I didn't really realize how cold it was. They shut down the automatic washer when it gets too cold, so I figured when I drove up and it was open, it would be fine.

Really not so much. I drove in, sat there while the arms went around the car and soaped and rinsed it, then went to drive away. That's when I noticed that both my side view mirrors were completely white and unusable. I thought, oh great, there must not have been enough pressure in the rinser to clean the soap off the mirrors, so they're all soaped up.

Really not so much. On second glance, I saw that the soapy water drips hanging from the bottom of the mirrors weren't actually dripping - they were icicles. When hot, soapy water is sprayed on a surface at high pressure, and it freezes into icicles before it has time to drop off... that's freakin cold.

Kinda funny to see though. I scraped the ice off of the left mirror, drove the short way to the supermarket, and let the ice on the other mirror melt in the sun. I wasn't sure it would, but it did. I wasn't the only one washing my car yesterday either - there were three people lined up behind me. Which just proves we're all dying for Spring.

...This morning on the way to work, I was drinking my water. I had accidentally left the bottle of water in the car over the weekend, and it was ice cold but not frozen, which I was surprised to find.

Well, I should say it wasn't completely frozen. I was driving along, and had drunk about a third of the bottle of water, when I took a long pull on it and suddenly found my mouth full of slush. You wouldn't have thought that much semi-solid matter could come rushing through a water bottle sports cap, but you'd be wrong. It's quite a shock to unexpectedly find your mouth filled with something you can't just swallow.

Yeah, me too, and I was driving at the time I thought it.

Which is probably the reason that in several states, it's illegal to eat or drink anything while you're driving. I'm not sure it's a primary offense that can get you pulled over, but it's something for which you can get a ticket. Slushmouth may not be the exact reason given when passing that bill into law, but I'm sure it was implied.

I hung onto my mouthful of slush until it melted enough to go down, then I put the half-frozen bottle of water away for the rest of the drive. That's freakin cold.

...Once I got to work, I got out of the car, zipped up my jacket and decided I wouldn't need gloves. Apparently I�m not really savvy at gauging the temperature. By the time I walked the 100 feet or so it took to get inside, the air had sucked every bit of moisture out of everything on me that it could touch. I could actually feel my hands and face drying out, and I could feel the rims of my eyelids and my nostrils crinkling up and getting ready to frost over. Forgive me being a little gross here, but when you can feel ice crystals forming in your nose, it's really interesting. Given, of course, that you know you're going to be inside a warm building within 20 seconds. Otherwise, not quite so charming.

The other thing that began to lose all its moisture and freeze up was my jacket. It surprised me a little the first time that happened. The jacket is made out of that thin, vinyl-plastic type, wind-resistant kind of material. I don't know what that material is called, in case you can't tell. But you know - that stuff. What you may not know about that stuff is that when it gets really cold (freakin cold even), it crinkles up too, and rustles like a crunchy cat toy or a crumpled paper grocery bag. You wouldn't think it had that much moisture to lose, but I guess there's some.

Funny story about that jacket, which I know you're dying to hear. A few weeks ago, I was finally taking the outdoor Christmas lights down. I went to zip up the jacket a little more, and the zipper, um, thing - you know, the slidey part (I don't know what that's called either) - broke off. Basically just shattered into pieces. I guess it was freakin cold that day, too. I was upset because despite how it sounds, I do know better than to think I could get through the rest of the winter with a jacket that won't zip up, but I couldn't really just replace the zipper. Since this is a reversible jacket, replacing the zipper so that it didn't look awful would take more skill than I have. But I didn't want to get rid of the jacket. I love that jacket. I was whining something to that effect to my husband, and he said, "What's so special about that jacket, did RSP sign it or something?" Smart ass. I said, "No, but come to think of it, he did touch it."

I was actually able to fix the zipper. I bought another zipper with the same kind of teeth, took the slidey thing off of it and put it onto the jacket zipper. That's not easy, I'll tell ya. I impressed my husband, and he's not easily impressed.

Anyway, as they say on the radio... it's freakin cold.

my mood -

the mood of the whole world wide bleepin' web -