By Rick Jacobs
Columnist
By the time we are all reading this, we will have made it through what I love to call Stupid Cold.
The high this past Monday was 14. The low was 8.
These are Moose Jaw, Canada, temps. This is routine for Minot, N.D., where the going joke around town is, “Sure hope summer lands on a weekend this year!”
This is our Earth laughing and saying, “Now, what was all that talk about global warming?”
My dream for my old age, and it really calls to me loud and clear whenever Mother Nature gets drunk and accidently elbows our planet a few million miles further from the sun, is to be able to pack up and drive as far south as necessary until it is 80 degrees again. Whether that’s Ft. Myers or Key West doesn’t matter.
Unfortunately, that can’t happen yet. Instead, I had to wake up Monday morning to single-digit temps and go to work. I had to get in and out of my car again and again. Normally that’s not a big deal. But there will be a 60-degree difference between inside and outside. You don’t see that every day. I’d be perfectly fine if I never saw it at all. And at least I have a warm car to hurry back into. What did process servers do when the horse was the main mode of transportation?
I love it when people say to me, “I love this kind of weather!” There’s a word for folks like that. Liars. No one can like single-digit lows. For folks having to work in that, there’s no way to be warm. Your feet freeze. Your hands freeze. Your mind freezes. Your pancreas freezes.
Ducks will find holes in the ice and swim in this weather. They will dive underwater to search for food. I’ve never been that hungry. Dogs who go hunting with their gun-toting masters will gleefully jump in water when it’s that cold and retrieve dead ducks. These ducks probably froze to death diving for food and don’t have a single ball of buckshot in them.
The guy who first penned the bumper sticker, “You can have my guns when you can pry them from my cold, dead fingers” was probably a duck hunter.
I also love it when folks from up North hear me talking about this stupid cold weather and then say, “Oh, heck, hoser. Youse guys in the South don’t know what cold is, eh?”
Uh, yeah we do. It’s going to be 8 freaking freezing cold degrees! So that’s cold. And, by recognizing that, we do indeed know what cold is. We just have enough sense to hate it. We don’t brag when it gets that cold. We don’t take our shirts off at Packer games when it’s 20 below just to get on TV. We stay home where it’s warm and laugh at you guys who do.
Of course, on Thursday when this is in print, we will be back into the 40s and even the 50s for a couple of days. We’ll break out the golf clubs, grill outside and count the days until spring.
So bring on the cold. I’m a man. I can t-t-t-take it.
I even have a prayer for it, sort of a process server plea:
Now I have to go outside
I pray the Lord the weatherman lied
But if I should freeze while on my runs
I pray the Lord will thaw my buns.
Rick Jacobs is a process server for Shelby County and a longtime resident of Bartlett. Contact him at rick45@aol.com.
