Yes, it's cold. So what?

It is minus 12 degrees Fahrenheit as I type this. It's cold outside. It's also January, a month not noted for balmy breezes or warm, sunny days. The fact it's cold outside should come as a surprise to no one.

It's also sort of snowing. Not especially dramatically, but an occasional flake or two has wafted down. Also not a surprise at this time of year, especially when we get hit with lake effect all the time. The Upper Peninsula sits between three of the Great Lakes: Superior to the north, Michigan and Huron to the south. Depending on which way the wind is blowing, if those lakes aren't solid sheets of ice, somewhere in the U.P. lake effect snow will fall.

We are, in short, having what for us Yoopers should be viewed as totally normal weather. It's not some sort of bizarre, unexpected natural disaster. It's winter. Hazardous driving conditions, including possible whiteout conditions, and life threatening cold temperatures are the norm up here from early November well into April. So why did everything shut down today? I have no clue, unless all the hype by the news media over the cold polar air pushing deeper than usual into southern states convinced various persons that an actual emergency existed. I can see closing schools in Missouri when it gets into negative numbers for kids waiting at bus stops; I can't see closing them in Michigan where we cope with this crap all the time.

What is truly bizarre, though, when it comes to coping with what is actually pretty ordinary winter weather is the number of businesses that shut down. Bars. Restaurants. Stores. I find all the closing announcements to be more than a tad unreal. Am I the only one who thinks that if snowmobilers and ice fishermen are able to go about pursuing their hobbies as usual there is no major winter storm event going on?

I will confess I tend to be a tad blase about winter cold. I still remember the fun times during my youth when there were cold spells that lasted for multiple days with temperatures hovering down around minus 30 for longer than I care to recall. It's a real joy to wake up in the morning and realize the feeble space heater in the living room did not manage to keep your bedroom above freezing overnight, the layer of ice in the water glass on the nightstand providing a strong clue the robe and slippers must be donned with lightning speed.

The Younger Daughter called from Arizona to ask how we were coping with the cold. I reminded her that 10 or 20 below at night is nothing. "Don't you remember," I asked, "that it was 30 below in the middle of the day when you were born?" Apparently her memory of the event isn't as clear as mine because, no, she doesn't remember it being super cold when my body finally expelled her. She arrived more than two weeks past the due date. At the time I was sure she'd heard just how cold it was outside and didn't plan to emerge until Spring.

I then reminded her about the Winter in the 1990s, the one where things stayed so cold for so long that I was sure we'd be seeing Frost Giants any time and municipal water lines froze that hadn't frozen since they'd been installed a hundred years earlier. We survived while living in a poorly insulated shoebox of a mobile home. She doesn't remember that one either. She was in Alabama staying with my sister while taking classes at the local community college.

I did tell her that if she's really concerned about her aging parents having to deal with Arctic air her dad and I could always come stay with her until things warm up here. We'd have to be house guests because the Guppy isn't running at the moment. Oddly enough, that's when she changed the subject from fretting about aging parents staying warm to hoping there's not another government shutdown this year because she really doesn't want to sit through another 4-hour staff meeting ever again.