Nov 11

Written by: host
11/11/2006 12:00 AM

So, there I was, this is no shit...

I've got one of those indoor/outdoor temperature thingies, the ones where you put a transmitter outside to tell you just how badly you're freezing your nuts off. In the case of this one, it's even got a little laser light thingy that helpfully flashes it on the ceiling indoors so that when I stumble in I can see how badly I've been freezing my nuts off without resort to turning on a light or getting it to light up or whatever.

And this year I was bugged. Because I really didn't seem to be acclimating well. Sure, I was sick for a while there, but even then I'd put on what I knew I needed for the weather (fifties, jeans, t-shirt, Arcteryx jacket, forties add a sweat-shirt, etc. down to full battle gear in the thirties) and I was freezing my ass off. I'd have to go in and reconfigure, never letting the stuff get too heavy because then the writing circuit shuts down. (If writing, the hood doesn't come up until low twenties or less.)

It would say fifty-five and I'd be dying in what should have worked. Forties were brutal. I thought I was getting old.

Then I bothered to check it with the reported temps.

Now, there's an issue there. It's called "microclimate." Weather data is normally gathered near airports and depending on what the various microclimates do to the air, you can be a tad colder or a tad warmer. (Where we used to live in Commerce, we'd get frost on our windows when nobody else in the whole region did. Just an odd microclimate effect.) But, in general, the temperature reported through weather.com was going to be somewhat close to what I was actually experiencing.

So there I was, this is no shit, in my Arcteryx jacket, a sweatshirt and jeans and just flipping dying. I'd been outside that way for most of four hours. (Oh, and I had my blankie around my legs.) But the thermometer was reporting 44. Okay, a tad on the cold side for the clothing, but I shouldn't be th...thi...THIS c...c...cold!

Then, with leaden fingers, I brought up the local weather:

"Clear Skies. Local TEmperature: 34. Feels like..."

Very fucking cold, that's what it fucking feels like! Holy grapp, as Berg would say.

My thermometer, for some strange reason, is consistently reporting it to be ten degrees warmer than it actually is. Time to get a new thermometer.

And I broke out the full fig gear last night. (Well, almost. Full fig, by the way is, in order of donning: regular underwear, wool socks, fleece pants on so the socks are under the pants, t-shirt tucked in fleece pants, wind-breaker pants, wristies, sweater tucked in wind-breaker pants, over wristies, fuzzy slippers, down parka. Below about 24 or occasionally for a couple of minutes, the hood on the parka goes up. Occasionally when it gets below 20 I'll add a blanket over the shoulder. Totally full fig involves a ski-bib, which I need to get a new one of, a fur hat, different underwear and various warmers.)

The wristies, by the way, are the cat's pajamas. 30 normally is on the low end of writability, but the wristies are awesome. Fingers are smooth and supple and the hands are still survivable. Oh, nothing Miriam wants against her skin in the middle of the night but the shriek is actually rather funny.

Anyway, between sometime day before yesterday and today I did 26k. I nearly lost about 7k of it, but I managed to recover it and everything's backed up at this point. Well, as long as I don't lose the SD chip, too.

Well, th...th...that's all, folks!

(In that case, I was imitating Elmer Fudd, not shivering. In fact, I just had to unzip my parka. It's only 33ish at the moment and I was getting a tad warm...)

And for Niel who will undoubtedly castigate me for being a wimp and over-dressing: Unlike the vast majority of surveyors, I stay more or less still for up to eight hours at a time with only occasional bathroom breaks. It's more like ice-fishing, one of the reasons I never in my life want to go ice-fishing. It would feel far too much like work.

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