Crazy From the Cold

 

Good (cold) morning everyone.

 

Even before I woke up this morning, I knew it was going to be cold. I knew this because I was curled up in bed trying to preserve heat when my eyes opened. I didn't need to check the thermometer to know it was cold, but sometimes it's nice to put a number with a feeling. It was confirmed with a reading of 5 degrees. The sun has come up, though, and now we are in a heat wave - it's all the way up to 8 degrees.

I find as I grow older I have become less resistant to the cold, or the heat for that matter. During the winter I dream about living in the tropics and during the summer I dream about living in the high mountains of Montana. What I need is to be independently wealthy and have both, but I know that isn't going to happen so I deal with the extremes the best I can.

 

What's really silly, though, is that I'm complaining about the climate in New Mexico. Our colds aren't really cold and our hots aren't really that hot. Overall, this is a pretty good place to live as far as the climate goes. After all, while it is 8 degrees now, by Friday the temperatures will be in the mid 50s. So my complaining really does seem more like whining.

 

Shoot, this isn't even close to the coldest I've ever been. Growing up in Los Alamos it always seemed like it was cold from Halloween to Memorial Day. I can remember in the mornings waiting for my turn to get ready for school (A family of five with one bathroom, oh the horror!) that I would sit over a heater vent wearing my terry cloth robe to try and get warm. That wasn't so bad because I usually had my little cassette tape player and the newspaper to keep me company. Yeah, I was a dorky kid.

 

As a teenager, we had moved higher into the mountains in to a house whose only heat source was a decorative wood stove. I used to sleep in a pair of longjohns, sweatpants and sweatshirt, numerous blankets and a sense that I would be frozen before the sun arose. In fairness, there was only one winter before the inefficient fireplace was replaced and the house was better insulated, but it was a tough time.

When I joined the Air Force, I was sent to Wichita Falls, Texas for technical school. That was a cold I had never experienced before and I was shocked that Texas, of all places, could get cold enough to coat everything outdoors with a five-inch layer of ice. Fortunately, I was there but a brief time and was sent to Las Vegas, Nevada to be a heating systems specialist. Yeah, if you are working on boilers and giant furnaces Las Vegas isn't a bad place to be. There was no such thing as a heating emergency there unless the steam boilers at the hospital or at the chow halls went down.

 

The coldest I've ever been, though, was when I was stationed in Germany. It was cold on a constant basis there and usually loaded with danger. I thought I knew what black ice was, but somehow the Germans were able to produce it with literal invisibility, just waiting for some poor slob to make one wrong step and fall on his butt.

 

During one cold snap there in which the temperatures had fallen into the negative 20s, the fuel oil in the storage tanks froze. When fuel oil freezes, if you didn't know, it essentially turns into wax. There is an antifreeze you can add to it to keep it from freezing, but we spent days out blowing wax out of fuel lines.

 

The base's liquor store was under renovation to those operations had been moved to an old, underheated hangar. (A hangar is nearly impossible to heat.) When we arrived to place some portable heaters, we kept hearing small "pops". The manager explained that when the bottles of beer froze, they would expand blowing the caps off. Sometimes the whole bottle would explode.

So while we were able to preserve millions of dollars worth of equipment, we were unable to save a few thousand bottles of beer. 

Like much of life, we were both happy and sad. Fortunately, there was more beer.

Have a great day today and stay warm.

 

R