Cold, colder, coldest

Remember cold??? Here in Wisconsin , we seem to have forgotten for a few years.. People are talking about it being cold when the temps are in the twenties, that is not cold!

Today it is cold. -12 when we woke this morning... At the risk of sounding like and old fogey I will make the statement " I remember when........." and proceed to tell stories of "years ago" (another old person's phrase) , when it was truly cold.

On my eighteenth birthday I stayed home from school and helped my Dad make a fence... It was cold that day... sunny, and the mercury did not rise past -5 all day. The story of why we had to make a fence on that particular day is long, complicated and a little fuzzy in my memory.... but the cold remains a vibrant memory... that was 1975.

I stopped writing and started searching for weather records just now,,,, I can't seem to find a site that tells what the temps were on a specific day, but I did find this good site for weather stories from Wisconsin. I plan to spend some time there when I am finished telling my story.

In January of 1982, my then husband and I moved our family and household about 35 miles across Dodge county. We had two little girls, they stayed with my parents that day, while we moved furniture, clothes, and everything else. It was cold that day....the house we moved into was a lovely old brick Victorian...... it was so cold there was frost on the INSIDE walls. All the pipes were frozen... another -10 day... and that night it snowed! Don 't let anyone tell you that it is ever too cold to snow... It snowed a lot that night. The house had a good furnace, but with the doors constantly being opened for furniture to pass through , the furnace could not keep up.

Remember when furnaces required chimneys...? We all drew picture like this one, with smoke billowing out of the brick chimney on the roof.

Now here is our exhaust vent today....
Note the icicles,,, that's cold!