And Then We Woke Up to This

Got yet another visitor to our island: Winter Storm FALCO made his appearance this morning. And I hate to tell you that I had a slight problem opening the outer door this morning, the reason being the snow behind the door. Cr*p!  It was still too dark to really see, but about an hour later I got the first glimpse of the outside world.   Look her! I always thought that winters weren’t really much to worry about out here at the coast. Obviously that was WRONG. Anyway, hopefully my neighbour is popping up again with his plow. Otherwise I’d be digging for the next 12 hours. Gosh!

Two More Sleeps And We Will Be Off To The South

We have been packing up the trailer for two days and we are still not done. Since the trailer is parked on the American side of the border we have to cross over there with every load. Both days have been very cold, though the sunshine helped to make temps livable. Inner parts of Maine have had –29C which really is extremely cold. Thursday will be the day we hit the road. Once we are on I-95 South we will follow it even through New York City. By-passing the Big Apple is not recommended this time of the year as we would have to get into higher elevation and farther from the coast, which could result in worse road conditions. Next big struggle will be passing Philadelphia,PA, then Baltimore,MD and Washington DC. After that we will have a clear go until Richmond VA, which shouldn’t be too bad. We calculate 4 days to reach Freeport,FL where we will stay with a “Boondockers Welcome” couple, Sherry and Pete. We wrote about their visit with us this summer and you can read about it here. Northern Florida is certainly not the warmest spot in the continental USA, but it sure beats sitting out one snow storm after the other. Yeah, Sunday we are supposed to get 18 inches on top of what we already have. It seems to be a crazy winter. Even tonight it’s supposed to start snowing again, hopefully not more than 4 inches. Our boondocking spot will be right on the water and I just hope they have no gators hanging around the area. Later, we might take a trip farther south into the St.Petersburg area but that’s not set in stone yet. We will be close to the Alabama area and might be doing some exploring into the State. With so many new things to see, I think that our time (3-4months) will be flying by very fast. Anyway, if you keep reading the blog you will find out. Happy Wednesday and thanks for stopping by!

“ELEKTRA” Makes Me Keep My Mouth Shut

It’s Sunday morning. Not real early anymore. Only a dim light is filtering through our windows. It’s mostly grey, colours are not discernible. “Elektra” has arrived in the Maritimes. After breakfast I have to go with Molly. She’s been staring at me for the last half hour. There is no excuse. I bundle up, wrap a shawl around my face. Between my fur hat and the shawl only my eyes are visible. Should have goggles for that. Stepping outside, I get a full portion of very fine snow in my specs. Molly is ahead of me, but she hesitates, looking at me. I give her a command to go ahead and she’s moving on. I’m stepping into 4-5” of snow. Molly is plowing through, leaving a grove behind her. We start walking to the road, but before reaching down Molly is taking up position to get her business done.   Good dog! I have to keep my mouth shut, otherwise “Elektra” is filling it with snow. I ate snow when I was a kid. We played outside in all kind of weather.  When we got thirsty, we ate snow. later I learned that snow is dirty. Even if it seems white. It is not very healthy either. We also licked on icicles pretending they were lollipops. It’s only some 55 years ago. Today I prefer ice cream. I survived! I loved winter!  Really.   I was looking forward to live in Norway when I was 25.  Norway’s got a lot of winter. They’ve got 7 months of it. Some people say they’ve got 2 winters – a green one and a white one. Some places and some years it’s close to the truth. I don’t like winter anymore. I got spoiled. In California. Molly had done her business and we were done outside. The wind is going to be at least 35mph, a lot more in gusts, so we hunker down. What else is there to do? Well, we are giving a lot of thought to going south. I checked the weather for the coming week. After “Elektra” has moved on it isn’t looking all that bad. We must try to get through the big-city-melee on a weekend. Makes for fewer trucks on the road. My personal travel adviser from Staten Island called again. More advice! Stay on I-95. How many lanes are there? 8 or 10, maybe. We have to cross the Hudson River. It’s gonna be so much fun. Yeah right. Eat your supper or what ever is on your plate, now! See ya later!

Baby It’s Cold Outside

Of all mornings this was a shocker. It was darn early when I opened the door to let Molly out. Actually the clock read 5:45am. My torchlight illuminated the thermometer and I saw what I thought wouldn’t happen this side of New Year’s Eve: It read minus 20C !!!  (-4F)  And the wind was just TERRIBLE.  Boy that was sure beating the –40C we had every winter in Alberta.          The fierce wind drifting the sea smoke over the island   After this I began studying the roads down south along the East Coast. How to get through NYC in the winter???  Not at all. Gotta find the sneak-arounds. And I just had chat with a guy on Staten Island. He gave me some valuable information. Just gotta plot it in. Talking about those temps again I had a thought the other day. How about researching Fahrenheit and Celsius?  Living in North America we’ve gotta deal with both. So why not looking into how we got these two widely different measures for temperatures? There was physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) who set up a scale between two fixed points of which one is the 32 degree mark. It marks the point where water turns to ice. The other is 212 degrees which is the point where water starts boiling. On Fahrenheit's original scale the lower defining point was the lowest temperature which he could reproducibly obtain using brine, but there exist several stories on the exact definition of his scale. According to a popular story and trivia question in Germany, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig in winter 1708/09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine. This is one explanation given why 0 °F is −17.78 °C, but the ammonium chloride cooling temperature actually is –3°C, whereas that of NaCL is −21.1 °C; the other explanation is that he did not have a good enough brine solution to obtain the eutectic equilibrium exactly (i.e. he may have had a mixture of salts, or it may not have been fully dissolved). Last but not least, the definition of the Fahrenheit scale has changed since. Anders Celsius (1701-1744)                                    Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686-1736) The Fahrenheit scale was the primary temperature standard for climatic, industrial and medical purposes in English-speaking countries until the 1960s. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Celsius scale replaced Fahrenheit in almost all of those countries — with the notable exception of the United States — typically during their metrication process. Fahrenheit is used in the United States, Belize, Bermuda, Jamaica, Palau and the United States territories of Puerto Rico, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands for everyday applications. For example, U.S. weather forecasts, food cooking, and freezing temperatures are typically given in degrees Fahrenheit. Scientists, such as meteorologists, use Celsius or Kelvin in all countries. In some nations, both measures are quoted. Early in the twentieth century Halsey and Dale suggested that the resistance to the use of centigrade (now Celsius) system in the U.S. included the larger size of each degree Celsius and the lower zero point in the Fahrenheit system. Canada has passed legislation favoring the International System of Units, while also maintaining legal definitions for traditional Canadian imperial units. Canadian weather reports are conveyed using degrees Celsius with occasional reference to Fahrenheit especially for trans border broadcasts. Virtually all Canadian ovens make legal use of the Fahrenheit scale. Thermometers, both digital and analog, sold in Canada usually employ both the Celsius and Fahrenheit scales. Also, in some instances (swimming pool temperature or cooking temperatures in Québec for example), temperatures are still expressed in Fahrenheit. So now we know about Mr. Fahrenheit who was a German. What about the other guy? In 1742, the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius (1701–1744) created a temperature scale which was the reverse of the scale now known by the name "Celsius": 0 represented the boiling point of water, while 100 represented the freezing point of water. In his paper Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer, he recounted his experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He also determined with remarkable precision how the boiling point of water varied as a function of atmospheric pressure. He proposed that the zero point of his temperature scale, being the boiling point, would be calibrated at the mean barometric pressure at mean sea level. In 1743, the Lyonnais physicist Jean-Pierre Christin, permanent secretary of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon, FRANCE, working independently of Celsius, developed a scale where zero represented the freezing point of water and 100 represented the boiling point of water. On May 19 1743 he published the design of a mercury thermometer using his scale. In 1744, coincident with the death of Anders Celsius, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) reversed Celsius's scale. His custom-made "linnaeus-thermometer", for use in his greenhouses, was made by Daniel Ekström, Sweden's leading maker of scientific instruments at the time and whose workshop was located in the basement of the Stockholm observatory. Since the 19th century, the scientific and thermometry communities worldwide referred to this scale as the centigrade scale. Temperatures on the centigrade scale were often reported simply as degrees or, when greater specificity was desired, as degrees centigrade. The symbol for temperature values on this scale is °C. In spite the low temps, I made the trip to Calais this morning to pick up my wallet. being there I combined it with a few more errands I didn’t have the nerve to yesterday. At what did we yesterday evening?  Yup, we uncorked the Champagne.                                                               Skål!