Photo Credit: Lisa.B
Polar Vortex? Is this the official name of the storm? I haven’t done much digging…digging around to find the exact name or digging out from the snow. Instead I’ve been hunkered down enjoying the snowfall one minute…usually when hunkered down inside my house…or cursing the extremely low temperatures as I scrape the ice or snow from my van…all while trying not to fall on the driveway and re-injure my knew.
Huge storms are not usually given a name, like say tropical storms or hurricanes. The name I am hearing most with the current snow and exceeding low temperatures is the “Polar Vortex,” so that’s what I’ll call it. And boy is it ever polar-like outside. This morning my daughter commented on the morning carpool drive that it was 39 degrees. Three days ago it was about 7 degrees or lower. Today felt cold. I have blocked out how cold it was on the single digit days. I can’t remember a time period where there were so many days with near freezing temperatures.
Over Christmas break, my husband opened my minivan to a “Sodapocalypse.” I had to take a kid to an early morning doctor appointment. Through some fluke of advance planning, I was up and in the van very early. I needed the extra time to deal with the carnage.
A can of Diet Pepsi froze, exploded, and left clumps of frozen soda all over the dashboard, rear view mirror, controls on the roof, and center console. It was actually amazing to see how much frozen clumps of sad were stuck on my car. I cleaned but didn’t make any headway as the soda was frozen in solid chunks. I chipped a bit. There was no other solution except turning the heating on and catching the drips. I moved everything I could out of the way. Fortunately, I had only left one can of soda in the car. Can you imagine the damage from a 12-pack???
My van resembled a cavern with it stalactites…or is it stalagmites? I googled…and stalactites are rock formations that drip from the ceiling of a cave to form an icicle. The soda “stalactites” were pretty, sparkly, shimmery. I was mesmerized until I had to actually clean up the frozen carbonated mess. As the heat warmed the car, I chipped, scraped, and mopped the frosty mess. In fact, as I drove in my toasty car I had to keep catching drips and drops of soda. The only plus in the icy disaster was that the soda was diet not regular. Now that would have been a mess.
