Rolled in the yard at 3:30 a.m. With help from my dear wife and two junior roadies-in-training (OK, and a dollop of portable DVD player) (not allowed non-stop, but when you are trolleying a 2 and 9 year-old across that stretch of I-76 and I-80 nonstop in January and after dark, you will try something other than license plate bingo), we drove straight through from Greeley, Colorado. Visiting family out thataway. So good to see everyone, fun to see how much the little tykes have grown, good to re-tell old stories, add a few new ones. My favorite times were when we all just made dinner together…chopping, dicing, cooking, bustling, talking all the time. Outside, the Christmas lights quietly glowing as the season wound down and the new year came on.
Temperatures started dropping somewhere in Nebraska. The dashboard thermometer was reading zero by the time we hit Iowa. Somewhere around the Iowa/Minnesota border it hit 22 below. Climbed back up into the teens-below, then about three miles from home in the flats it hit 21 below again. At the top of our hill it read 14 below. After I checked the chickens (turned the trouble light on to take the edge off), I checked our regular old weather thermometer and it said only about 10 below so perhaps the car’s reading was suspect. Clearly, for bragging purposes I will go with 14 below. And if for some reason I wind up at the cafe, I’ll use the measurement from down in the flats. Key is to use the phrase “out by us,” as in, “Out by us it was 21 below.” It’s all about how you present the truth.
