It's Cold

Yep. It's cold. "Colder than a [fill in the blank]." The dashboard read 6 degrees this morning when I went to school. They're predicting wind chills in the negative teens and possibly twenties tonight and tomorrow. And it keeps snowing. All of the snow on the ground has been covered with another layer of fine snow that just covers up all the dents and divots that were there. And it's all crunchy when you walk on it. In fact, everything is crunchy. Everyone is feeling the need to hunker down. I can't tell you how many times I heard "I just want to go home and read a book with a cup of hot cocoa under a blanket" today. And as is the case each time we have extreme weather, it's all we talk about.


In addition to the weather talk, teachers continue to hope for snow days. Yet, as is the case this week, we're hoping for "cold days". Days when it is not safe for kids to be standing at the bus stop. Days when the wind chill is below zero.


I was told earlier this week that the schools will close when the wind chill is twenty degrees below zero. So like every other hopeful teacher, I have been stalking every weather website in the hopes that they will tell me that the windchill will dip down. Low. When I finally found a wind chill watch alert on one of the websites, my prayers were answered. The watch almost guaranteed a wind chill of 20 below. In fact, it hinted at 25 below. Perfect, I thought. 25 below would just lock it in.


As it turns out, not quite.


I told our secretary of my awesome find on the internet, and her face didn't light up like I thought it would. She then relayed some terrible news to me. Apparently the principal got an email that was a reminder of when they close schools for cold weather. The pin in my glorious snow day bubble stated this: the windchill has to be 25 below zero in order to close schools.


Sigh. I think I need to flush a few more ice cubes down the toilet.