It's cold this weekend. Real cold. Not Minnesota cold, mind you, so it's not like Ohio is going to elect an angry, failed comedian to the Senate or anything, but still pretty damn cold. It's the kind of cold that makes me wish that I was a bear and could hibernate through the whole thing. It's so cold that I think the electronics in my normally hyper-reliable Subaru have had a thermal lobotomy. The car is running fine, but the digital thermometer is now preceding the temperature reading with a hyphen. Odd, that.
Oddly enough, we've only had a smattering of snow so far this year. We had just enough this week for the airport plows to have built up a small but uncrossable wall of snow/ice in front of my hangar. Not that I'd be flying anyway; anything under about 25F is just too uncomfortable. It was also just enough snow to really bollocks up a couple of my work commutes. The interesting thing about winter driving in Columbus is that it makes the slow folks go slower and the fast folks go faster.
A large percentage of Central Ohio drivers seem to always consider the road conditions to be worse than they actually are, while a smaller (yet statistically significant) percentage insist on driving as if the conditions are far better than they are. The people like me that have an uncanny ability to unerringly gauge the precisely perfect speed for the conditions are stuck in the middle. We have to watch out for the yahoo that didn't clear the snow from his car and is making seemingly random lane changes as he fearlessly blazes a trail through the drifts in the far left lane, slaloming around the overly cautious drivers crawling along with a nearly palpable cloud of fear emanating from their cars, and we also have to watch the we ourselves don't run into the 15 mph rolling roadblock caused by a white-knuckled driver gripping the steering wheel as if it was his Harry Reid's neck.
I'm not a big fan of snow, but I do prefer it over the ice that we have had for the previous two weeks. Snow at least offers the opportunity to do some fun things. Things like teaching your dog how to write his name in the snow during his periodic trips to the great outdoors, for example. It's easier than you might think, actually, and requires very little intelligence on the part of the dog. The trick, you see, is to simply change the dog's name to Yellow Spot. Voila! Now every time he goes out, he writes his name in the snow!
Today is the coldest day of the year so far (which, this being only the 16th day of the year, isn't saying all that much) and for some reason the powers-that-be have decided to close the schools. Now I don't want to get into my I-walked-five-miles-to-school-through-conditions-that-would-be-too-harsh-for-Todd-Palin mode, but really: I don't remember my school ever being closed because it was cold outside. Of course, Global Warming hadn't been invented yet way back then, so perhaps it just never got this cold. Really, I'm just saying. Too cold for school? It's not like they're in an old wooden shed behind the church using the dry corn husks that weren't used in the outhouse to burn in a hub cap to keep warm, after all.
So, after making a short story long, I'm just here to tell you not to bother reading this blog this weekend. I won't be flying.
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