At daybreak today, the thermometer hit a record low for the date. It was 13 degrees below zero.  That’s 83 degrees colder than enjoyable.  The way I see it, at about 25 degrees, it is cold! After that it is just degrees of misery.  When I was a kid, we didn’t have the wind chill factor or if we did, nobody talked about it. I think it is just an invention of the news media to sensationalize the weather. “Tomorrow morning’s wind chill will be -35 degrees below zero! At that temperature, your nose can freeze and fall off in less than a minute”  Yes, I know it is either -35 degrees or 35 degrees below zero but -35 degrees below zero sounds so much colder.   What ever happened to , “It will be cold and windy in the morning, bundle up.”

For those of you who live below the Mason-Dixon Line, I will try to describe what these temperatures feel like.  I know, I know, wind chill is the “feels like” temperature but that is like saying the sweetness factor tells you how sweet something is. If you have never had sugar, you have no comparison.

The first thing you will notice when you step out into the sub-zero cold is that your nose hairs freeze. Perhaps we need a nose freeze factor measured in seconds to replace the wind-chill.  We will be having a 3 second nose freeze factor in the morning. That means on the second breath, you will notice the inside of your nose is getting sticky as the moisture on your nose hairs starts to freeze and stick to the other freezing hairs.  The next observation will be the squeaking snow or ice under-foot.  Your footsteps are no longer silent. They squeak.  It is a sound unlike any other but once you have experienced it, you never forget the sound. It is higher pitched than a squeaking old floor and the colder it is, the higher the pitch.  After the squeak factor, you notice the hardness of the surface on which you walk. While it is true the density of the surface increases with the cold (you know, heat expands; cold contracts) the real difference is the freezing of the soles and inner-soles of your shoes. Even the padding between your joints loses  its compression factor. This is why the cold is described as bone jarring cold.  The last feeling you get in these arctic temperatures is the the lack of feeling in extremities. This is the numbness factor. It is determined by the insulation  in your clothing.  If you go out without a coat, you might have a 3 minute numbness factor.  This factor would be actually two numbers because there is also a time factor for warming up when you return inside.  So a 3-5 numbness factor would result in numbness after just 3 minutes outside without a coat and a 5 minute warm up time when you return inside.

Now that you know the standards, I can describe the weather I experienced this morning.

This morning, when taking out the recycling, the temperature was 13 degrees below zero; there was a .75 sec. nose freeze factor and a  +5 octave  squeak.  There was a zero compression factor along with a numbness rating of .2-27.  In short it was FRIGGIN FREEZING!

Have a great day. I’m not taking out the garbage any time soon!

Had we gone on our planned vacation, we would have been settled in down around Orlando for this week. We would have been just down the road from our long time friends the Dershimers, I don’t know what the weather is there now but it is certainly cold up here. I make that statement because I am assuming we would have made it through the winter mess that blossomed between here and there during our planned travel. We both felt uneasy about the trip and cancelled it a while back. Perhaps, had we gone, that winter mess might have caused us great discomfort. We will never know but we have learned to follow that inner guidance. Is it the soft whispers of God or some spiritual guides giving us advice? Is it relatives past, concerned about or well being? I don’t know but I pay attention. I think it stayed in the single digits here today and it sure would be nice to be in sunny Florida right now.

I have started the long process of converting some of the old VHS tapes into DVD’s. Some of those tapes contained old movie footage from before I was born. I have reels of tape taken by my grandmother. Many minutes can go by without one head in the shot. The only way to to besure your head was not cut off was to bend over! It was still fun to see the old degraded movies of my Mom and her family. There were lots of picture of my Grandfather in his garden or with his daughters. With grandparents back then, being no different than they are now, there were LOTS of grandkid pictures! I saw me as a toddler along with my siblings. Good medicine for a cold afternoon.  I was amused to see me at age 4-5 years drinking a bottle of Coke. So, I was a Coke drinker for over 60 years!

I watched Krystal in a production of the Christmas Bunny at school (she was the bunny). I could not understand the words any more now than I could then but it was still fun to watch.

There are many cassettes to copy and I am sure I will enjoy them all even though those early VCR cameras were certainly poor quality. Or was it me? In any case the auto focus was not very auto and even less focus. But I still can remember those good times with the kids. Do we really realize how lucky we are with the ability to capture the present so we can watch it when it is just a memory of the past. Not only can we watch it, we can also share it  instantly on a friends computers or big screens half way around the world. With this many changes in my lifetime, I can’t even imagine what it will be like in 20 years. Dick Tracy and Buck Rodgers technology will be old hat. I guess it is already but then , so am I.

That’s what I was thinking.

Retirement age; that is the age you are finally able to stop punching a time clock and have the time to do more of what you want and It is a good thing you have all that extra time because everything you want to do takes longer.  I mean everything from tying your shoes to trying to figure out how to set your new watch or the car radio.

Since the early days of computers, I have been teaching myself how to make them work for me.  It was  fascinating.  Fast forward to today.  I am still learning! For almost a week, I have been using the Lynda.com website to learn about the web design software, WordPress.  I don’t know when I did my first website but it was a long time ago. To keep up you need to learn new software. That has never been a problem for me.  Until now! It takes me several hours to learn a chapter and about 30 seconds to forget it.  It isn’t the understanding; it is the simple memory.  Add in the fact that I might doze off in the middle of a tutorial and you can understand why it is taking so long.  I know what the program does and even how it does it but I forget where to find the right button to click to set up a menu or add properties to a file.  It is a little like my recent dieting – 3 steps forward and 3 and 1/2 steps back.

I have three monitors in front of me. My laptop is running the tutorial and the other two are displaying my current software; in this case, the WordPress program. By the time I look from what I am supposed to do on the first monitor to the last screen to do it, I have forgotten what I was trying to do.  I have found that I have to watch about 4 tutorials and then go back to the second one and go forward 4 or 5 and then back 3 or 4.  It is a little like a bug hitching a ride on a rolling hula-hoop.  While going in circles you travel a long way but don’t get too far ahead with each cycle.

As you can see though, I have made enough progress to get the site up and running. The posts below were just practice posts. I still have a lot of the basic design to do but at least it is functional.  I will be making most of my normal posts here.  I’ll post links on FaceBook.  I still have a lot to say and this should be the easiest way to say it.

Let me know what you think.  in the comments section.  Hopefully, I will figure out how to manage the comments.