Extremes Here and There

Bill up in Wasilla says it was 31 degrees above zero when he posted today's entry on his blog.

At our house it got down to 17 below this morning. If you compute the difference, that means Wasilla, Alaska was 48 degrees warmer today than our little corner of Iowa.

We like to keep our house at 72 degrees daytime. That means our furnace has to heat this home 89 degrees this morning to bring the temp up to a comfy level. (Never fear...we are somewhat green and turn the thermostat down at night.)

Due to the snows and the snowy streets my Mom was stranded at her house Christmas Day. And again New Year's Day. Telephone calls just aren't the same as being with family! And last night, about 10 PM, she called and said her furnace was not running. The repairman came right away (bless his heart!) but has to order a part. He brought her an electric heater and she has an electric blanket. I tried to get her to spend the night here but she said she wanted to stay home to watch over things. She has read too many stories about electric heaters! Mom is having an "extreme winter"!

This morning she says the fellow will be stopping by again but now I'm wondering how long it will take to get the part. This furnace is only a couple years old. Surely it can't be that difficult to find a part?

This has been the coldest cold snap we've had in many years and this last snowstorm was a record snowfall for the month in our state capital. If global warming is "real", it did not happen here last summer (we had a record cool July and August) and it is not happening here now. If it is unusually warm somewhere else it is unusually cold here.

Let's try to average things out a bit better, can we?

(According to geologists the last ice age we had here in Iowa ended some 13,000 years ago - plus or minus a few hundred years. I am not interested in another one happening soon.)

I have to add this postscript...the Des Moines Register reports that the temp in our little town early Monday morning actually dipped to 30 below zero. I don't know where the official weather station is for our town/county but I do know that there is a small river valley about 15 miles east of here that consistently runs lower temps in the winter than we do. The cold air comes sliding down the hills and settles into that low valley. It is my understanding that only descendants of hardy Norwegian and Danish immigrants live there. Everyone else has moved to higher (warmer) ground. Decades ago!
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