Open Mouth, Insert...

Cold By Any Measure

My car has a gauge that measures the outside temperature while the engine is running, and one thing I like to do on cold nights like tonight is sneak glances at the temperature on my half-hour drive home. I had heard that it was supposed to get into the teens tonight and wanted to see for myself (knowing that the numbers would be skewed somewhat by windchill).

Starting my car in the parking lot of my workplace, the gauge read a nice, round 20. It quickly dropped so about the time I reached I-40 (which is less than two miles from work) it read 14 degrees, matching the recorded low temperature for the evening.

When I rounded 440 and got to the 64 exit, the temperature was down to 11 degrees. And when I finally winded my way to the back of my subdivision (where all the townhomes live), the gauge read a whopping 8 degrees. Thinking that windchill had skewed the numbers, I sat in my car with the engine running for a good five minutes to see what would happen.

The temperature did not move.

It was then that I turned off the engine and scurried into my comfortably heated home, thankful for the invention of central heating.

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