When Is It Going To Get Cold? 

    Living in Central Oregon exposes us to some cold weather. Or so we’re told by people around here. The problem is that, because of where we’ve lived before, this weather doesn’t seem cold. The worst it’s gotten, since we’ve been here, is 18 degrees below, and that was only for one night. When the temperatures gets in the single digits people around us are moaning and groaning, and we’re looking around saying, “When is it going to get cold?” 
   The problem with our attitude is that we have lived in Northern Wisconsin and know what cold weather is all about. Lorraine and I would go for a walk in the evenings when it was 5 below with a wind chill of 35 below. And we were having fun and enjoying the out-of-doors. 
   When it gets that cold some strange things happen. One such incident was recorded in my journal. 

    A couple of months ago I took the Buick through the carwash and immediately got out to see if they had removed all the frozen gunk that had accumulated on the car’s bottom. Well, when the car door was open the water that was around the edges of the door froze. This took about five seconds. It was reasonably cold. The problem then was that the door would not latch shut. 
    An interesting aside: Here, in Central Oregon, when the temperature drops below freezing the carwash places shut down. In Wisconsin, they do not even think of closing until it gets cold, like down around 20 or 30 degrees below. 
    So I was then driving around town steering with my left hand and with my right hand reaching across my body holding the door shut. Do you have any idea how heavy the door is on a 1977 Buick Riviera two-door? Especially when one is going around a right-hand corner. My right arm is still longer than my left arm. 
    All that is only to establish my mind set for what happened soon thereafter. I stopped at the mall and parked in a slot that had a handicapped parking slot right in front of it, but in the next row. That left a handicapped sign, which consisted of a pipe with this common handicapped sign at the top, standing right in front of the car, but facing the slot in front of me. The thing stood about seven feet tall. Now these parking spaces where right in front of one of the main entrances to the mall. Where else would you find a handicapped spot? 
    I got out, did my thing in the mall, and got back into the car. I buckled myself into the Buick, good citizen that I am, (also it was the only way to keep the door from pulling me out of the car every time I did a right-hand turn), started the thing up, and concentrating on the door problem, and not having a car in the handicapped spot in front of me, took off straight ahead. That is, I did until I realized that I was running down that blinking handicapped sign. (Not that the sign was flashing on and off or anything - blinking in this sense is just an expression from my British past - look it up - that comes out at times when I’m frustrated with something.) 
    When I got stopped the sign was about six inches off the ground. I backed up and drove off, took a couple loops around the parking lot, and then came back past the flattened sign. I stopped, got out of the car, and with much grunting and straining straightened the thing up enough so that nobody would disembowel their auto or themselves on the thing. A group of elderly ladies standing by the mall entrance were nodding and smiling at my civic-minded efforts, so I gave them a deprecatory wave as if to say, “tain’t nothing ladies, I do this kind of thing all the time.”