It was two below this morning, -2°F. For my metric friends, that's like -40°C or -408 millidarcys or -768 kiloKatal or something.* Too cold!
I stayed in bed as long as I could, then got up briefly -- and went right back to bed. Hunger finally drove me out, to a plate of sausage hash with an egg cooked atop it and some nice Manchego cheese as a buffer. I tried a trick this time that worked out well: sprinkled a generous pinch or two of flour in the skillet before adding the hash. It browns up nicely in the grease left after my blotting-up of as much as I could from the decanned block of hash and it moderates the slightly-harsh spiciness.
Trying to decide what next. "Back to bed" has a certain appeal but it lacks panache.
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* Oh, all right, okay, it's -19°C as near as matters, actually -18.888888888... until you run out of eights. So, you're so clever, what's the special thing about forty below that got it included in my bogus list of conversions?
Obviously because it's:
ReplyDelete"Minus forty F'n'C."
Which translates into "frick en cold" no matter what scale you're using.
-40F = -40 C it is the crossover point of both scales
ReplyDeleteWell, if you call it 458 degrees Rankine, it sound almost balmy.
ReplyDeleteIt's 0xFE K, of course.
ReplyDeleteBitter cold days are why big, honk'in tube linears were invented.
ReplyDeleteOr, huddle over the RF cage of a lower-band AM 'phone x-mitter.
Have you made any progress on that little 20 watt AM rig you've been restoring?
The - 40 brings back some frosty memories.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, I worked in bush camps in northern Ontario, and we still skidded logs with horses. Mechanized skidders were just on the horizon.
Iron-clad rule in winter: stay indoors if colder than -40.
Reason: your lungs - and the horses' - can get frostbite inhaling large gasps of icy air (working hard)!
The thermometer: a bit of rye whisky in a bottle outside the window. It turns to slush at -40. So if you saw slush, you just stayed inside and opened a full crock of rye :-).
-40F and -40C are the same! :)
ReplyDeleteMinus 40 is about as cold as I have ever experienced. As noted above, it is where the streams cross, or rather the scales. On the other hand, -40 with no wind is not as brutal as -20 with a 25 mph wind.
ReplyDeleteForty below? Do you have a heater in your truck and you're off to the rodeo? :V
ReplyDeletePerhaps instead of thinking about the crossover point, Roberta was just humming a little Johnny Horton earworm that includes "When It's Springtime In Alaska (It's Forty Below)"
ReplyDelete