Saturday, February 18, 2006

Freezing to death

OK, OK, I know it's winter and we've been off the hook since the season began, but this is definitely overkill. It's miserable out there. After I took an Olympic style fall on Thursday, I decided not to go outside again. I deserved a gold medal for falling with real style - chin first all four limbs splayed. So I let the snow and rain fall. I watched the temperature drop 15 degrees in just 5 hours, but eventually I had to go outside. So this afternoon I did so. And man, it's really, really cold. I put on heavy boots with cleats to maintain myself upright on the solid ice. It took several tries to even get the car open. And over one hour to chip most of the ice off of the windows (that is both João and I working together). Of course sometimes we had to come in and thaw out the fingers and toes and nose. But who says we can make the car go anywhere? On the building side of the car, the tires are frozen solid into ice that goes half way up the hubcaps. We hammered and chiseled away at it, but even after 45 minutes of work, lots of salt, sand and rugs, no go. Since it's 0 (or -17 C), and no thaw in sight, we'll have to figure something out. It's really too slippery out to push the car, but hopefully we'll get enough of a thaw in the next few days that we can get some grip.
I'm just thankful we don't have to go out! We had so many accidents here yesterday. One with 40 cars and 4 deaths. That's downright scarey. I'll be very glad to see this nasty little spell come to an end.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Peggy,
I came to Rio to visit my "kids" and to the funeral of Pr. Fausto´s mother. I tell you: the heat is almost unbearable!!! Hurray for Air Conditioning.
Read http://www.idph.state.il.us/public/hb/hbheat.htm
There is good information about the subject.