It is frickin’ cold. Not quite as cold as a couple of weeks ago, but cold none the less. I could kiss the person who invented heated seats. They sure are nice before the car gets warm, which can take a few miles when it’s 8 below.
Anyway, my post isn’t about the wonderful heated car seats, it’s about the last time I suffered through frigid temps, the coldest temps I can ever recall.
It was about this time of year, late January, in 1993. Phil was transferred to Tennessee a few months earlier and the kids and I stayed in Maine until the house sold and the semester ended.
I don’t recall the exact date we moved, sometime around January 25, 1993, because I remember letting Becky pick out a birthday cake at Kroger in Tennessee (on Jan 28) because the baking dishes were packed. It was the first store-bought birthday cake she ever had. (As a side note, we have a warm spell almost every year around her birthday. Obviously not this year!)
We had no snow until after Christmas (just like this year!), then it snowed a little bit every day. Chris kept a very large area shoveled (we didn’t have a snowblower back then), although he wasn’t too good at keeping the end of the driveway clear.
By moving day, we had piles of snow everywhere. The mover wasn’t happy when he saw the piles beside the driveway, but he was able to plow through it and had lots of room to turn the rig around in the area Chris kept shoveled.
When the packers arrived it was near zero for the daytime highs. It wasn’t too bad – they were in and out but we could keep the doors closed. (Packers pack everything; we moved a box of rocks and several radiator coolant bottles full of water.)
The next morning the movers came to load the truck. It was 40 below overnight, warming to a tropical 20 below at midday. I took the kids to school and my poor Aerostar van didn’t want to go; oh how I wished for an engine block heater. (It sounded like it wished it had an engine block heater too. :)) The movers had the doors blocked open all day. I wore a coat and gloves in the house and was still cold. I turned the thermostat down to conserve oil and we still blew through close to 100 gallons that day and they only had the van half loaded. It was frigid the second day they loaded the van too and the furnace sucked down more oil, they finished up late afternoon and hit the road. The kids and I spent the night in a local hotel then headed south.
When the van arrived with our possessions, the first thing off the truck were the bicycles. We had a huge paved parking area behind the garage for the kids to ride on; they thought it was so cool that they could ride bikes in January. That was a new experience for them as we moved to Maine when Chris was 6 and stayed for 10 years.
Footnote: The house sale, which was supposed to close the day after we vacated, was delayed. We were told it was a temporary problem and the sale was expected to finalize the next week so we didn’t drain the pipes and winterize the house when we left. The sale fell through a couple of days after we left, but before it could be winterized the area had a power outage that lasted several hours when daytime high was still well below zero. Every cast iron radiator in the house froze and broke. The wood floors were a skating rink. They couldn’t fix it until the spring thaw because there was no heat (and they were very busy fixing everyone else’s broken pipes).