The Canadian Temperature Scale

We went downtown Wednesday afternoon for shopping, dinner, and a movie. There's a bus that leaves from about a block and a half from here and goes straight downtown -- fairly convenient in a not-so-big city -- but bus tickets cost $2.10 a piece. In Austin, you can ride all over town for $ .50, or to the airport for $1.00. By "you," of course, I mean "certain people who aren't me," because I get to ride the bus for free.

In any case, it was cold all day, around -8F, and the wind was fierce from time to time. We took several opportunities to duck into shops and browse around, for warmth as much as for interest. I'm enjoying the cold weather, to be quite honest, as long as I'm properly bundled. So our first stop was to the mall to pick up a toque and a scarf. I wound up getting two toques and a scarf, all on sale, for $5 total, and I was good to go once more. But the wind was deceptively fierce -- way colder than the actual temperatures -- and my bare legs beneath my jeans got pretty frigid.

I'm here to tell you, it's a unique experience indeed to have the contents of your nose freeze up into little boogercicles, and to have your hair freeze to your toque. It was cold. Even Scott admitted it. I asked him if it was too cold, and he said no, he was just cold enough. He was without his gloves, after all. -20C is middling cold, apparently, and -30C is very cold, apparently. When we got home that night, to my dismay, it was only middling cold -- only about -8F. I was hoping for something colder.

Yesterday, I got my wish, when the temperature dipped to -32C (or -25F). I didn't go outside much at all -- only long enough to go on a short walk (and jump on the snowbanks in my snow boots) and to take the garbage out to the trashcan in the back alley. Just the couple of minutes I was out with the trash, gloveless, as I'd lent mine to Scott for his trip to work, was enough to make my skin burn by the time I came back inside. It turns out, I'm a furnace. My core temperature has been pretty well fine -- it's just my skin I have to watch.

Today, we took a long walk. It was close to -30C when we left the house, and we were out much longer than we'd been yesterday. We walked all the way down to the river, and out onto the bridge. The point where Scott said, "Can you feel your ears and your cheeks? If your skin stops hurting, we're in trouble, and we've got to go home," that was the point where I got a little concerned. The wind was really frigid out on the bridge overlooking the river -- around -40C, which is also, incidentally, around -40F. It's hard to have sharp fine motor skills when you're wearing gloves, and it's hard to manipulate all the manual settings on my camera without those. There was steam rising from the water, cold as it was, and I was having problems seeing through the viewfinder as it fogged up every time I leaned in close. I took a lot of pictures, in any case, and I'm hoping some of them came out so I can post them later.

On our way home, we stopped at the Broadway Cafe for lunch and hot chocolate and poutine, that peculiar Canadian concoction. The cashier was impressed when she found out I was from Texas. "How are you liking the weather?" she asked me. The weather's nice, if cold. She was talking about how there's been a 40-degree differential in the weather in the last few days, and I said that we have that in Texas all the time, but that it never gets this cold. It occurred to me later that she was talking Celsius degrees, which is a rather different deal. On Sunday, when we hung out with Scott's family, it was hovering around 40F, and with the wind chill, it's been hovering around -40F. That's an 80F degree differential. That's like having 100F weather on Monday, then 20F cold on Friday. Or 80F to 0, except... it never gets to 0 in Texas, does it?