Mild Cold

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I think it’s widely understood that one’s life experiences form roughly (very roughly) the ages 16 to 25 establish your sense of what’s “normal” in the world. I suppose that’s why this current cold snap really doesn’t seem that cold to me. From the National Weather Service:

Meteorological winter is considered to be the months of December, January, and February. The late 1970's were some of the coldest winters on record in central Illinois. [...] At Springfield, the coldest winter was the one before that, when an average temperature of 19.6 degrees was noted in the winter of 1977-78.

I was 17 that winter. Winters for the next five to ten years, well into the 1980s anyway, were nearly as bad. Hardly a winter went by without a severe spell of below zero temperatures that sometimes got down to the -20s. The coldest temperature I ever experienced was in Northern Illinois where one night in January 1985 it got down to -26 officially and -27 at the radio station at which I worked.

So this shit ain't nothin'.