THIRD TIME LUCKY

I hate cold weather.


I do live in Arizona, but at a high enough altitude that we get freezing temperatures, and even snow once or twice a year (at least until global warming began turning every one's weather upside down and backwards).


And last night was one of those cold nights - it got down to 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

Our church is almost completely volunteer-based; we don't have a  paid clergy, church members teach the classes and run the organizations.

And we volunteer to keep our church building clean.

So this Saturday morning, our names were on the list to meet early to clean.

I called the brother who is in charge of the cleaning schedule Friday evening to confirm the time.

And he told me we would be responsible for cleaning the OUTSIDE of the building.

The pavements - and porches - and leafs - and raking - OUTSIDE.

And guess what?

It was COLD.

LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW!

Arizona has a certain reputation.

Dry - desert - cactus - sand - and hot. Hot. And hot.

People always seem to combine the idea of the Sahara, Mojave and Las Vegas, and that becomes Arizona.

So it's interesting when people discover that yes, we have trees (mesquite, mainly, I will freely admit), snow-capped mountains, below freezing temperatures. We're not all desert.




But when actual snow falls....

Well, us Arizonians go slightly nuts.




Schools close, army bases empty early, evening activities are cancelled. And we go outside and take photos - and build mini-snowman with our children (6" tall max).

And keep our fingers crossed that everything will be closed tomorrow too.

COLD AS ICE

The coldest temperature ever recorded in the world (outside of a lab, I mean) was at Vostok, Antarctica, at minus 89.2 °C (-128° F, for all you non-metric Americans).

The coldest in the U.S.A. was -62.11° C (–79.8°F) at Prospect Creek Camp in northern Alaska.

The coldest in Arizona was at Hawley Lake -40° C (-40° F - and isn't that cool that it's the same both in Celsius and Fahrenheit?)

Sierra Vista got down to 11° C. (11° F) in 1985 (and I'm not making this up!), with the lowest recorded in Palominos, Arizona has been the same.

That puts our local weather report back in perspective - tomorrow night is predicted to get as cold as -5° C. (23° F).

ATTENTION FELLOW SOUTHERN ARIZONANS - WE ARE NOT GONNA DIE.

But now we have a GREAT excuse to go shopping tonight!

NEVER HAVING TO SAY YOU'RE SORRY

If you held a job where you were proved about 85% of the time to be incorrect, misleading and responsible for widespread panic, would you expect stable employment?

Once again, the weather forecasters were utterly and completely WRONG. Today was sunny, bright and cold, with slight showers early this morning. And tonight is one of those brilliant, cold and (as of 1924 hours) moon-less nights where you can almost reach out and touch the stars.

It's beautiful; but no a flake of snow.

Now I do freely admit I may wake up tomorrow morning and have to shovel a path to the hay shed (shoveling with a teaspoon since the only sort of shovel I have is actuall IN afore-mentioned hay shed).

But I'll take my chances.

LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW LET IT SNOW

Growing up in Los Angeles, snow was the cotton stuffing on elementary school projects or the marshmallows that you used to create a snowman from.

Icicles were either plastic things put on corners or the silver strands you hung on Christmas trees. Winter was when you wore a sweatshirt in the evenings and we normally got our 1.25 inches of rain for the year.

When I was in high school, snow became the dirty packed stuff that you could drive up in the Sierra Madres to see heaped on the side of the road and in shady patches between the trees. One time we found enough on one hillside which faced away from the sun to actually slide down a metal trash can lid.

In college in central California, it was a little closer, and there was enough in the mountains to actually walk in. However, it was still packed, dirty and frozen on top.

When I moved to Michigan, I was sitting in a t-shirt and shorts in my dad's living room on the south side of Kalamazoo when it began to snow. I learned two things very quickly that I had never know before - one, that snow is quiet. I expected to hear it much as rain hits the windows. And two, it isn't a good idea to run outside in your bare feet when it's snowing.

And suddenly I was dealing with:

- Unploughed roads at 4:30 a.m. (I had to be at work at 5)

- Sliding up and then back down the one major hill in Kalamazoo

- Shoveling the way to get out of the parking lot at the end of your shift when the snowplows have piled in up all their accumulated snow behind your car.

- Learning how to open the door when the lock is frozen shut.

- How to use an ice scraper repeatedly during your commute.

- Why wearing three pairs of socks become standard, and your winter boots need to be at least one size too large, and the cute woven mittens that you get at Christmas time are completely worthless in below zero weather.

It was an educational winter.

Since then I have lived in Utah, Kansas, Germany, and Maryland.

- Utah is a dry snow, which is a completely different and much more rational sort of thing.

- Kansas is where the wind never stops and black ice under the snow is a constant menace.

- In Germany, no one notices the snow or let it affect any part of any one's life. It wouldn't be German.

- Maryland at first completely collapsed at the prediction of any possible accumulation. Schools and government offices shut down, the grocery stores were ransacked, and pitiful stores of rock salt and snow shovels were sold out within minutes - with simply the prediction of snow.

Then in 1984 or 85, it snowed. Seriously. For a couple of weeks. Out of sheer necessity, Marylanders learned that milk was not necessary for survival, cars could be driven in snow, and we could actually keep the national government operating in a fashion (i.e. as well as it normally operates, which is not very well).

And in the next couple of days, according to the National Weather Service, we may actually get some serious snow down here, and NOT just on the surrounding mountains. So, since we are accustomed to a sprinkling of snow, twice a year, that melts before 9 a.m., this might get interesting.

I will keep you posted.