Wednesday, January 22, 2014

I Hear You Had A Snowstorm Up North - Picture

This connected age is strange.

Sitting in the Big Green Chair in the living room, I was enjoying a sunset.  My friends are mostly here in South Florida, my family is mostly in the Northeastern US.

The Florida Friends were complaining how we're going to have a few cool days.  I can't handle anything under 70F anymore.  I used to stand out in the subzero cold in a shearling jacket and shrug it off.  Then I got in shape and lost my flab and with it went the insulation and the cold weather tolerance.

That said and done, it's not fatal.  50F will be annoying, but it's highly doubtful that someone is going to die of hypothermia sitting by a pool in South Florida.  The houses are leaky, windows are designed to allow the breezes to flow through and cool you, not keep the heat in.   In this day of Air-conditioning, that is a mistake since the breezes will blow the cool out just as well as blow it back in.

I'm watching TV.  Colonel Hogan was tweaking Colonel Klink for the hundredth time, and the snow was just beginning to hit Philadelphia and the other cities of the Northeast.  My cousin in Long Island took 3 1/2 hours to go home on the Long Island Expressway, a trip that normally took 20 minutes.  Schools started closing even before the snow stuck to the first windshield. 

I remember those days, sitting in my house on top of the hill, up in the third floor front bedroom that became our den.  Heat rises, so that room was always a little on the warm side, even if the ground floor was cold.  Tuned into all the media, we'd notice that people would be stripping the supermarkets bare of Bread, Milk, and Eggs.  The usual comments would fly that you get snowed in and make French Toast.

This time it was surreal.  I'm hearing family and friends talk about how bad it was.  It's getting difficult, don't go out, stay home, stay safe, the roads are clogged.  All the while the FEC train is coming through delivering Orange Juice and Rocks to places North.  I'm watching the sunset through my front window over the shopping center.  The breezes were blowing through the palm trees, and the last of the rays tickled the bottoms of the clouds to a golden glow. 

Shivering in the breeze, I brace my camera against the big blue trash bin and fire off a few shots.  It's cold out, but nothing like what my family is going through right now.  I'm thinking of the silly things we'd do in this weather.  Fill the front yard with snow from the driveway.  Blow soap bubbles and watch them shatter when they freeze before hitting the ground.  Make snow cones from the hopefully clean snow in the back yard.  Skip eating the snow cones because it looks like something the dog made.  Joke that while the dog wrote her name in the snow, it always comes out like "blblppplllbbbttt" so that must be her name in Canine. 

Coming back inside, I see Colonel Klink get into the side car that falls off the motorcycle as Sgt. Schultz pulls away.  Another time the allies pull another fast one on reruns.  May as well watch the rest and stay warm with a can of cherry soda.

Stay Warm Folks.  I'm hearing that while I was shivering in the low 60s, it was 8F in Cherry Hill, NJ, and 15F in Atlanta.

I'll take my 60s.

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