About forty-five minutes ago someone had the audacity to call me on my cell phone. I was walking along the sidewalk, towards a bus stop, when my cell phone started ringing in my pocket. I slipped off my warm mitten exposing my naked hand to the cruel freezing air, reached into my pants pocket and pulled out my cell phone which said "David" was calling me in big bold letters.
Normally I'd say David is really nice guy, he and his wife have taken Becky and I into their home for a over two months, he's made us home-made bread, he makes us popcorn, home-made tortillas, among other things. He runs errands for his wife getting various ingredients that she makes into dinner or lunch for all four of us. Dave is always helping people it seems. I've never heard a cross word from Dave. He makes good jokes and laughs at good jokes too. What more could you want from a guy? How about not calling me when I'm outside in the freezing cold Dave?
He asked me if I was with my wife at the moment, I wasn't, then he let me know that he and his wife were leaving their apartment to eat dinner at someone's house. A very friendly, courteous, thing to tell someone that you live with, or someone that might wonder where you were. But a very annoying thing to a guy who's walking to a bus in -5 degrees F, with a bone-chilling breeze. No "bone-chilling" is not the right term, "skin burning" is better. It might not sound as good as "bone chilling" but "skin burning" describes better, in my mind, what a "gentle breeze" feels like when it's -5 degrees F. It feels like someone's mixed hydrogen peroxide with rubbing alcohol and wasabi paste and put it on any part of your face that's exposed to the air.
Actually there's no way it's only -5 degrees F out there, I've been in -20, and it didn't feel that cold. But if it truly was merely -5 degrees F, I'd say: "It's -5 degrees, but it feels like -35 degrees."
I'm pretty sure that jumping into the river that runs through the center of this city would feel warmer. Remember water, as a liquid, can't actually go any colder than 32 degrees F (or 0 degrees C), it would turn into ice, a solid. So that's 37 degrees warmer than the air that was burning my face earlier today.
But don't worry, I won't be jumping into any rivers or lakes. I'm back inside where it's warm and i'm wearing fleece lined sweat pants, a tee shirt, and a fleece lined sweat shirt. My hands still feel a little funny from taking them out of their protective mittens for two minutes, but I'm not really mad at Dave, I just wanted to brag about how cold it was outside today. Sometimes when we complain we're actually bragging aren't we?
And really you can't even feel sorry for me because I waited over twenty minutes for a bus in the aforementioned freezing cold. In actuality several empty taxis drove by with their green "available" lights on, the taxis are only about $2 here. I'm just stubborn and I'd rather stand on a crowded bus holding on to one of those straps while the ice that's collected on my eyelashes melts and drips onto my face while I think about how best to describe a gentle breeze at -5 to Becky, Dave and Irene or in my blog. What's the fun in suffering if you can't describe it properly? -5 degrees F is just a number.
