It's COLD

The long awaited cold (at least for some us) is here. Around sunset, the temperature dropped below zero Farenheit, and it's still going. The wind outside our window has been blowing about 30 mph (50 kph). This amounts to a "wind chill factor" as we call it: the wind accelerates the loss of heat through the skin, making the air temperature feel colder. It's one of the easiest ways to get frostbite, so you have to be careful to cover all exposed skin. There's a good explanation and a chart here. Check out here for a table in Celsius and meters.

You can look through our dirty window out over the city and see smoke and steam billowing out of the chimneys. Without going outside, it just looks cold.
I ran down to the Lake for a couple of minutes, while I could still feel my face. The wind isn't coming off the Lake this time. It's as calm as mirror, with no wind. It's actually warmer near the Lake: no wind, and it's not frozen yet, although it does have ice in it. It reminds me of a slurpy or slushy, if you've ever had one. The little black things on the Lake are ducks, and they didn't seem to mind at all.

Before the Europeans came and started farming in the 1830's, there was, and still is a 1000 mile prarie to the west of Chicago. For our purposes, it serves as a place for the wind to gather strength. Today, it's my guess that these are winds coming off the prarie.

While we're down on the Lake, and as a tangent, I had to take a picture of something I think is kind of cool here. If you look offshore, about 2 miles off, there are 3 enormous, stationary structures. spaced evenly up the coastline of Chicago. The one nearest to us is almost directly east, and it's shown at the right. It's the tiny dot on the horizon, with our poor camera on full zoom. Today it looks particularly lonely, surrounded by slushy, indifferent water.


When we first got here, I thought this was a boat that never moved. Keren looked into this and found that they are really water intake pumping stations: the City of Chicago draws water offshore from Lake Michigan. I don't know if this is all or part of the water that the city uses. I found that they first built one of these intakes back in the 1850's (see here), when the sewage they pumped into the river made for choleric, dyssentery-ridden water. They actually had a tunnel dug below the clay bed of the Lake to bring the water into town. But that's another story that I will tell later.