As many of you know, I live in northern Minnesota. I absolutely adore this area and usually cannot imagine living anywhere else. However, that does not mean I always like it up here in the northland. I must say I was rather amused listening to reporters complain about not feeling their feet during the Inageration. Dude, come to Minnesota, and you will no longer have feet.
I was embarrassed that Sarah Palin was initially so popular in Minnesota and am deeply ashamed that we are returning Michele Backmann to Congress this year. Jesse Ventura was pretty hard to take (for me), but you gotta admit he was interesting. As we are also the home of such political legends as Paul Wellstone, Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale; I suppose we are allowed a few nutballs.
Lately I have been complaining a great deal about the weather. We are actually experiencing a fairly normal Minnesota winter, but because we have had almost a decade of unusually warm winters, the fact that temps around here have not exceeded freezing for almost 10 weeks, is getting very, very old.
Last week we did not see temps rise above zero. The high yesterday was 10 below and hit negative 25 by 8:00 or 9:00 pm. Tuesday morning the lows reached 35 below and we will not see above zero temps until Friday. It warmed up a bit today as we hit minus 1. The weather channel is predicting a veritable heat wave over the weekend, as we might see temps in the upper 20’s. Of course all that means, is that it will get warm enough to snow.
So why am I going on about this? Because Mike Barnicle (sitting in for Jughead on Morning Joe-Boy) yesterday said that 95% to 99% of blogging is therapy. Heh. So I thought I would share a terrifying experience that started around 11:00 last night. Then I will try to make as much fun of it as I possibly can (My therapy! Yay ;~).
Last night I was working on a diary, having fun with tubes and politics, when the power started popping off and on. At first I was just annoyed, because I lost all the work I had done, but after I looked at the temperature outside and saw that it was 30 degrees below zero I began to realize the extreme danger we were possibly facing. We had been (and still are) under a severe weather alert predicting windchills of 40 to 50 below zero. I had covered the fireplace this week and gave up on the woodstove in the 3 season porch, because it was so cold they were almost pointless.
Preparing for the worst, I cranked the furnace up, started bringing in wood, and got a fire going. It was fortunate that I had done this as my fears prove correct. The lights went out around 1:00 am and did not come back on until 6:30 this morning. I spent over five hours completely focused on keeping a fire going in our home. We had no other source of heat without electricity and visions of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” kept creeping up my spine. Remember the scene where the buildings began to freeze almost instantly? Yeah, completely over the top, but I have seen miles of telephone poles snapped, first from freezing rain and then from bitter windchills.