Have wolves crossed the Brandywine?

[neotoma]

It is predicted to get below zero tonight -- 0°F, which I believe is -18°C -- and the management office at my apartment distributed flyers reminding everyone to keep their thermostats set to 68°F at a minimum and turn the faucets on to a trickle tonight to keep the water pipes from freezing.

I'm contemplating sleeping in the living room tonight, because my bed is right up against an outside wall, and my heater has not been able to keep up -- it's been running almost constantly today and the temperature in my place is about 65°F.

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Yeah, it's definitely a night to wear socks to bed. I dunno, they haven't called this another polar vortex year but we've gotten a lot of days of windchills below zero up here.

[malkingrey]

Up here in far northern New Hampshire, it's gotten below zero Fahrenheit more nights than not, ever since the start of the year.

Warmer weather can come any time it wants to, and by "warmer" I mean "anywhere between 20 degrees and freezing."

[neotoma]

My apartment building is from the 1930s, built for typical Washington DC winters, which this really isn't. At least two people I know locally have had their pipes freeze.

I am so done with this winter. Which means we will probably have snow on March 31st, just like last year.

[malkingrey]

We were down in Connecticut this past week, doing a guest teaching gig at UConn, and the word there was that pipes had been freezing all over campus, including in some of the dorms.

The plumbing in our house isn't really endangered until the temperature gets down around -20°F; unfortunately, we've been getting a lot of nights like that lately, not even counting the wind chill. And PVC piping does not react well to extreme cold.

(If we were rich, we'd have the whole thing replumbed in copper. But we're not rich; we're freelance novelists who only just last spring finished putting four kids through college -- a serial project that took a bit over 14 years, which is more than they give you in some states for armed robbery.)