If it's freezing here in southwest Florida, which it is, then you, dear reader, are probably even colder. It was 29 degrees in my driveway this morning when I got home from work. My car windows were covered in frost this morning, and since I don't own an ice scraper, I had to turn the heater all the way up and blow it full blast on the windshield to melt the ice. It only took a few minutes.
To put this into focus, we are looking at the possibility of tying or breaking some long-standing records. We set a record low in Fort Myers this morning at 35 degrees, and it's colder east of I-75 where I live.
Even more interesting, I saw on the local news yesterday that record for the longest number of days where the high temperature doesn't reach 70 degrees as 12 days. I think it happened twice, once in the 1910s and once in the 1930s. They showed a graphic of the longest stretches of nine days or longer, and there were only about eight or nine of them since the beginning of the 20th Century, with the most recent occurrences being three times in the 1970s.
Well, the high last Friday was 77 degrees. Since then, over the past four days, the highs haven't gotten out of the 60s, and the forecast for the next week, through next Tuesday, is for the temperatures to stay below 70. That would be 11 days, which is highly unusual. We normally get one or two blasts of cold air every winter that drop the temperatures down around freezing, but usually, it warms up in a couple of days or so. This time, it's been one cold front after another and it isn't warming up.
I know that most of you would take high temperatures in the 50s and 60s and lows around freezing with gratitude, but you probably don't live in a place with palm trees and other subtropical vegetation. We aren't used to this kind of extended cold, and to get an idea of how the weather feels to us, subtract 40 degrees or so.
I'm ready for spring now, please.
