Zero degrees Fahrenheit is really cold. You'd think I'd know that by now, but sometimes I'm slow. (Those are our ski tracks and the gate into one of our family camps, left.)
(It's recently come to my attention that I live in the country. You'd think the well and the septic tank, not to mention the amount of time it takes to drive into town, would have clued me in a bit earlier. However, that's another topic.)
While growing up in Oklahoma, I had only a slight sense of the term "cold." Anything around 32F was in the frightening zone because that's when rain became the ice that caused accidents and froze trees and made life difficult. Sometimes they closed school, which was a bonus. Sometimes it snowed, but not often. So I didn't really know much about winter. Or at least about cold winters.
I still carry that mindset, a bit, even after 5 years in New Mexico, about 10 years in Colorado, and a couple of winters here. Around freezing = cold. Anything below that = also cold. But the temperature rarely got down into the single digits, so I didn't really learn any distinction among degrees of cold.
In the past couple of years, I've noticed that 32F is actually significantly warmer than 2F. It makes sense that that's the case; it's just not something I have thought that much about. I know that if the temperature is near freezing, I can toss on my down jacket and mitts and pop out to to the car without having plugged it in the night before.
But when it's 20 degrees (Fahrenheit degrees, that is--they're smaller than Celsius degrees) colder, I really have to plug in the car. It helps to wear a scarf. My warmest mittens and my heaviest coat are absolutely essential. As is zipping up the coat.
Today, we went skiing at about 4:20. It was about -2F this morning and stayed there all day. By the time we got outside, it was about -4 F. Yeah, that's cold. So cold it hurts. So cold that skiing, though pleasant in some ways, was unpleasant in many more ways, and therefore we didn't stay out long.
And next time, if I feel absolutely so restless that I MUST ski on a very cold day, I'll try to go when the sun is at the highest point. It really does make a difference. Relatively speaking.
