Cold Cranking

Dearest Rachel –

Despite having woken up with a dream in my head, I’m going to write you about the reality of the day. The thing is, my dream was about finding a cache of letters you had written to Junior’s daughters upon being asked to be their godmother, which I know never happened. Oh, you tended them regularly in real life, and they looked up to you – and still do, although I expect their memories will fade faster than mine, due to their young age – but I don’t know if the godmother tradition is as strong up here as it was where you grew up. In any event, having to say further about it would require me to recite all you wrote them about feeling inadequate for the task, but promising to do your best, and offering them all kinds of advice that, when I’m asleep and poring over it, sounded deep and profound, but now that I’m awake, I couldn’t repeat if my life depended on it.

Besides, there are a couple of real stories going on today that are probably worth telling about, even if they’re either repetitious or delving into the current events that I keep saying I prefer not to go into, but can’t seem to avoid. Any one of them, though, are at least a little unusual in their intensity or activity, and the confluence makes them that much greater than the sum of their parts. So here we go; best to bundle up for it.

And I mean it; for all that I complained about last Monday being the coldest day of the year, today has decided to announce that its beer need to be held – particularly since, if you let a carbonated beverage like that freeze, it’s going to make a considerable mess. As I type this, I’m getting notification that the temperature is below zero (in Fahrenheit; 0º Celsius is an absolute given), and won’t get out of the single digits even at its warmest today or tomorrow. At least tomorrow is thus far forecast to bottom out at zero, but let’s face it; at this temperature, a degree or two in either direction hardly makes a difference. It’s just cold, baby; best to stay indoors today as much as possible (not that that’s going to happen, but I’ll get to that a little further on).

With that being said, I hardly need to tell you that I’ve got both of the heaters running full blast in the bedroom. And while it took a while to get there, once I switched them to their respective peak performance settings, it’s reasonably comfortable in here. But it wasn’t an immediate thing by any measure; I went to bed with all the “reindeer skins” I could assemble – and it’s not as if I woke up sweating and overheated, either. They don’t exactly struggle to keep up with the frigid temperatures outside seeping into the room, but they do have to stay at full bore in order to maintain ambient comfort; there’s no pause in their workload, once an ideal temperature is reached.

And while we could shrug and say something about January in Chicago – which it is, of course, and there’s no contesting it – the wild thing is that this isn’t confined to the Windy City. No, this is a nationwide phenomenon (I’d suggest that the worst of it is east of the Mississippi, but considering my aunt in Colorado is dealing with weather far worse than this, maybe it’s more widespread than all that. Then again, just like we say it’s January in Chicago, she could claim that it’s January in Colorado, and leave it at that). There’s talk of New Orleans getting it’s first multi-inch snowfall in over a century, for example, and they’ve moved the inauguration indoors allegedly due to the cold in Washington, which hasn’t happened since in forty years. One can hardly keep from chuckling at the idea that certain folks vowed that it would be a cold day in hell before they would allow this fellow back in the White House… and there they are, here it is, and here he is. I’d say it’s a pity you can’t appreciate it, but as always, I realize it’s such a miniscule thing compared to the sweep of eternity that I hesitate to mention it in the first place.

Then again, I’m about to transition from that event to the fact that I still have to get on with my regular life. Turns out, it’s a good thing my car battery died last week, when I didn’t have to be anywhere. While I had to take it to the dealership to get it looked at (at Dad’s recommendation – I’d have probably tried to find a battery place, but he thinks that regular service at a place that keeps a record of one’s car’s entire service history is a better way to go), and it wasn’t a quick in-and-out process, they took care of it. The guy told me that the unit in the car only had some two hundred cold-cranking amps, which admittedly means nothing to me until he pointed out that a battery is supposed to have over five hundred. Long story short (too late, I know), it would not have survived the weekend, let alone today and tomorrow. So it’s a good thing I got it replaced.

Especially since I really can’t afford to hunker down for another forty-eight hour period, or even twenty-four hours. To be sure, Awana is canceled tonight, but that’s because it’s been pre-empted, rather than that it’s too cold. Daniel and I will still be heading out to church, but for a different type of meeting. So it’s a good thing we can still leave the house, even if the weather is a bit forbidding.

Still, if you could keep your eye on us, and wish us luck, it would be most appreciated. In the midst of this cold, we could sure use it.