Not cold enough and not enough snow yet!

OK, now that the weather has finally broken - it's above zero degrees now! Yay!

I can relay this wonderful short bit that I collected when I lived upstate -- more northern than here, closer to the Canadian border, wish I was still there, believe it or not! (Even my kids wish we lived up there still, but I digress, as I can do so easily...)

So! I remember every January and February, where the whole town would be wondering if the lake would freeze enough for the ice castle to be built. Well... then we'd get a cold cold cold snap where the thermometer would not register because the numbers didn't go that low!! If I didn't get up in the middle of the night to run the faucets, the pipes would freeze. The forty or thirty degrees below zero would last for a week or two - sometimes longer!- or the cold would go away for a week and then return for another week or two... Anyway it would invariably be colder than words can describe. And then we'd get a big dump of snow, the warm front that would end the big freeze. So we're outside shoveling the two feet of snow, and all we're wearing is boots, jeans, a short-sleeved t-shirt and gloves. But we'd yell at the kids to go inside and get their coats on because it was still below freezing. But the temperature difference was so large that it was WARM in comparison!

Similarly, a friend of ours has done three tours in Iraq and each time he comes home with his hair long. I asked him the first time 'why?' His reply? He said the temperature difference between the day and night was sometimes nearly 40 degrees (average 120 day, 90 at night). He said he kept his hair long to prevent sunburn and to keep warm at night! Keep warm at night - yes I repeated 'cause does that make sense when it's 90 degrees out?

Yes, more snow yesterday. Still loving it, too! (I'm not surprised, as I have yet to really shovel, thanks to my wonderful boys!!)