We usually get a few cold days every year. No surprise there. But we don’t often get Environment Canada issuing an extreme cold warning, like they have for the next day or so. In fact, I believe the last one was in 2015. The year when we had all the snow. We might not have noticed. Our thermometers was buried in snow drifts.
A friend called me the other day. He had worked it out in Fahrenheit and figured out it would be about -11 degrees, back when we were kids. And yet we would still walk to school, probably with our mothers yelling at us to zip up our coats or we would catch our death. Us ignoring them because we were immortal at that age.
Of course that was in a time when we would spend afternoons in temperatures about that cold playing pond hockey. Too busy trying to skate like our heroes to even think we were cold. It’s been a bit tough to play pond hockey this year. You’d certainly lose way too many pucks. The ice has been… well, nonexistent. And one really cold day is not likely to make it safe, so be careful.
It’s not that we haven’t had temperatures this cold before. It just doesn’t happen often. And this year, we certainly aren’t used to cold.
This morning we were chatting in the office and someone mentioned block heaters in cars. A few people had no idea they are pretty much standard on a lot of vehicles, but unless you go looking and notice an electrical cord hidden down by your engine, you might not even realize they are there. Although if you ever lived in more northern areas, you probably know.
The coldest temperature ever in Nova Scotia was in 1920 in Upper Stewiacke. On January 31 of that year they recorded a temperature of -41.1 Celsius. Or -42 Fahrenheit. When the two scales come together, you know it’s cold. And that mastodon along the side of the highway? I don’t think that’s a model. I think it froze there that year.
But it will be cold for the next few hours. Stay warm. Don’t go out with skin exposed. Frostbite is a possibility. It might not be a record, but it will still be pretty chilly.
