Cold in the morning, cold and bitterly windy in the early afternoon, and still cold tonight. It'll be a little warmer tomorrow, and then WHOMP! it'll get down to or below zero tomorrow night, accompanied by howling winds, and stay in the single digits for a few days.
Alaska is having one hell of a winter, meanwhile. Not cold so much as staggering amounts of snow and storms. A whopper of a storm in November kept Nome from getting its last fuel shipment, and was saved from emergency measures by a coast-guard icebreaker making a path for a Russian tanker. Cordova and Valdez are practically buried in snow. No, not "practically". They are buried. That's the coast. Fairbanks has dense ice fog and has almost hit -50°F. I'm not even going to ask what's going on up in Prudhoe Bay.
There's something about stories of extreme weather survival that grip us. Even the grinding misery of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Long Winter keeps us interested. I think part of it is a kind of horrified fascination at a life suddenly cut off: when the snow is so deep you simply can't get through, it's like being buried alive in a landslide... except that the landslide is white and soft and beautiful and silent, when it isn't about to suffocate you.
A lot of the horrified fascination with extreme weather is how it shows how unprotected we really are, when it comes right down to it. Or how limited that protection is. We trust our houses to stand, and when we see someone else's crushed or blown apart or washed away, it's like watching a trusted authority figure resign in disgrace. Oops, guess we didn't plan on every contingency after all...
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