I absolutely do not for the life of me understand how you folks up north deal with the cold weather. This week has been very unusual and frigid for us here in south Florida, the upper 20s and lower 30's for the lows and mid to upper 50s for the highs all week, a warming trend tomorrow (upper 60s) and then, according to the weatherman, back for another several days of this very non-typical weather. (We're 15 to 20 degrees below normal!)

I can't imagine another 20 degrees colder than this with snow and ice, what do you guys do in the mid winter .... hibernate?

I post on the Axiom forum.

Yeah, I don't know how people up north do it. In the mild zones like here, -40C is sligthly chilly, but up north it can go down to -60C! Now, THAT's cold!

Right now we have around 6 inches on the ground with a few more expected. The temps have been below average here as well. We haven't been out of the teens in a while with today's high at 20.

Eric I worked in Grand Forks, North Dakota for a summer and remember the summer mornings being as cold as most of our mid winter days here, while I was bundled and complaining about the cold the local folks were relishing the warm summer ... "COLD?! Come back in January whenever it's -50F out and we'll show you 'Cold'"

I don't think so.

I guess it is all relative. In the mountains of Maryland, we'll see at worst a few days that drop to 0°F; that's pretty unbearable. I couldn't imagine -40°. I've heard at that temp if you spit you can hear it crackle in the air, as it freezes before hitting the ground.

Here in NC, We have not been above freezing for about 5 days. We still have snow on the ground (in shaded locations) from the pre Christmas snow. This is the longest that any snow has stayed around for over 50 years. I think it is Global Warming!

We are having an another unusually warm winter her in the Maritimes. It has, with very little exception, been bordering just above or below zero degrees Celsius (32 f).

It's all relative to what you are used to and how smartly you dress. Layers are the key to adapting to our quickly changing weather. That way you can adjust quickly when the day starts out sunny and calm +2 but then a cold front moves in and by the day's end it's -15 with a wind chill factor taking it to -30 or more.

Most here start to talk about the weather when it hits -20 to -25 and start to really grumble when it hits -30. It won't make the news until it hits -35 to -40 and that's usually to due to the added wind chill.

When it's not windy, I prefer to strap on a headlight and go for a ski at night verses complaining. If you dress sensibly, the only thing unpleasant are the coyote tracks. Fleece is your friend. Cotton is your enemy.

Right now the weather is my enemy. It's been too warm to build up any decent snow for skiing (horizontal or vertical) and that makes me more grumpy than the cold.

Believe it or not, but you do get used to it. The hardest part is getting through the transition between 20F and -50F. Once you are there, you just prepare for it and worry about other things that you can control. I wear shorts to the gym in the mornings down to about 0, and then I wear sweat pants. It does make riding the sleds a bit more challenging when the needle dips under 0F. You need to take more time ensuring that you don’t have any skin exposed or you will get frost bit adn won't even know it till you get somewhere warm. One strange benefit is that tires stick to the icy roads better when it gets about -30F or cooler when you’re clipping down the highway. You know it’s cold when you need to take a weed burner to your home heating propane tank to get it to vaporize and while you are heating the home propane tank, you need to occasionally heat up the weed burner propane tank with the weed burner….. Tires do a clunk-clunk-clunk for a while at around -50 or so until they warm up and get rid of the flat spot...... I have a video that a co-worker made for one of the grade schools. It’s about -40 and he is holding a steaming hot cup of coffee. He throws it straight up in the air above his head and it vaporizes. Not a drop hits the snow. Pretty cool trick we do for the southern newbie’s that come to work up here.

Hey Mike, how about recalling all this arctic air we have been in for the past 3 weeks We are currently at -6F and went to -20F last night, even for us this long of a cold spell is unusual. We get very used to our chinooks blowing in and bring us temps much closer to, if not above freezing. It is our environmental snow removal process, but this winter the snow is just building up and up.