I know some of you have probably been enduring much colder, nastier weather than I have here in Denver. Farther north and east there has been a lot more snow. Down toward Oklahoma City and Dallas they’ve had horrible ice. (I sure haven’t missed that aspect of winters in Oklahoma.)
And I suppose it’s all relative, too. What you’re used to in the winter. What you’re prepared for. Etc.
Well, I’m here to tell you, I’ve had a bellyful. A week ago we had temperatures approaching 65°. From there it slid rapidly downhill on Tuesday while I rushed out for gas and groceries. I haven’t stepped outside since, and I’m getting severe cabin fever.
We got a couple of inches of snow, which would normally melt or evaporate within a day or two, but not this time. It’s still on the ground, too damn cold to go away. The thermometer has been in single digits for a week — that’s on both sides of 0°. We set a new record low one night of -13°. Whee.
I’ve had all the faucets dripping and all the under-sink cabinets open. I tried running my two humidifiers to keep the humidity up, but that was futile. What little moisture I generated turned to ice on the double-glazed windows. So my indoor humidity has been hovering around 15%. The static electricity is so bad that when I touched the programmable thermostat the other night, the program went haywire. I had to get out the printed instructions and a flashlight (the area is not well lighted) and spend about 20 minutes getting all 28 time periods (4 a day for 7 days) reprogrammed properly. (Yes, there’s a copy function, but I’ve never figured out for sure how it works.)
I finally decided it might be cozy to fire up the little gas fireplace I turned off five years ago because the pilot light generates heat in the summer, and I wasn’t using it in the winter because it messes up the heat distribution to the rest of the house (the thermostat is only about 10 feet from the fireplace). Oh, and the pilot light puts out some white crud that sticks to the inside of the glass and I have to practically disassemble the entire thing to clean it. Naturally it wouldn’t start up. Probably dust clogging the outlet or something. And it’s been so long since I’ve looked under there, I have no idea where it is. Still, considering local power outages, it seemed prudent to get it started up. Except I couldn’t.
It actually got into the 20s today, and they say it will get above freezing tomorrow. Believe it or not, our average temperatures in December are in the 40s. That sounds absolutely balmy right now.
Hope everyone out there is getting through this in good shape and that cabin fever is the worst thing that befalls anyone. Those of you in Southern California and South Texas can just … umm … refrain from comment.
Looks pretty cold but it also looks absolutely stunning! I would give a lot of money to live in a place that looks like that! Wonderful photos! Thoroughly enjoyed your post! Thanks much for sharing!
That’s a beautiful picture in your post. Did you take that? I feel your pain. We still have icy roads and school is delayed another day. We lost our power for two days, and our tankless water heater froze. So, now we have power, but we have not had hot water for two days! You don’t realize how much you miss it until it’s gone! 🙂
I hope things warm up a bit for you. At least, a lot of the bugs will die off….
I was without power for three days during an ice storm in Atlanta, but it wasn’t nearly this cold. Still, a very unpleasant experience. Hope you get your hot water back soon. There have been times this week when a hot shower was the only time I felt completely warm.
No, I didn’t take the picture. I just looked for the coldest looking one I could find. Of course, it would look colder if the water were frozen. It’s a huge picture, actually. Would make good desktop wallpaper — in the summer.
…bitter cold, minus temps, snow, black ice on the highways, trees/lines down from accumulated ice… all I want for Christmas is SPRING!! – and in other wx related news- rmnp won’t be able to open Old Fall River Road in 2014 due to flood damage; wonder how much this winter will add to the work? (if you do get that pilot light going, make sure they check the venting and any batteries in CO detectors, etc for you!)
Aww, I didn’t know Old Fall River Road was damaged that badly. But I guess a dirt road would wash out a lot faster and worse than a paved one.
For now I’m just going with no fireplace. Been fine that way for five years. But yes, I’ll have everything thoroughly checked if I do get it started up again.
Yikes! Yes, that kind of cold… Well, I can’t even say it’s for the birds, because where I live, most of the birds leave to avoid it!
A lot of birds who call this area home in the winter (most notably Canada geese) are probably wishing they’d gone farther south this year.
Jeez PT, and here I was thinking our single digit lows and highs in the upper 20s were bad! 😯
But you had a lot more snow than we did, didn’t you? Relief is on the way; we bounced up into the 40s yesterday.
Only about 4 inches – far short of what other places got. Funny though, our forecasts don’t show us topping the 30s until late next week!
The whole system is moving off to the NE. Sorry to hear it’s going to take that long for it to pass you. I heard one long range forecast that said it’s going to go up around the North Pole and come back around and down here again late next week — possibly even colder than this last week was. UGH!
Cold is pure matter of clothings!
Definitely makes a difference. But I think it’s also a state of mind — whether you think its abnormally cold (based on what you’re used to), regardless of the actual temperature. While I was complaining about 0 being cold here, Jimmy Kimmel was making fun of reporters in Southern California complaining about it being 40.