Cold

Several cities in Alabama broke temperature records yesterday for the coldest temperatures on January 8th since those records began being taken.  When I left for work yesterday, it was a bone chilling 14 degrees.  I know people who love up north think that's nothing, but I live in Alabama, and we rarely get this cold.  The warmest it got all day yesterday was 33 degrees.  Today, the high is expected in the 40s, but the weathermen have been off quite a number of times this week.

Even worse than the cold yesterday was the fact that when I go to my classroom, I had no heat.  Inside it was 53 degrees, so we had class in a different room that had heat until it could be repaired.  It turned out that the four heaters in my building blew the main circuit breaker.  Honestly, it never really got warm in my room.  My building is the only building equipped with electric instead of gas heat, and the bad part of that is that the electric heat is a heat pump.  I don't know if you've ever had the "joys" of having a heat pump, but they are bit very good at keeping places warm.  They will heat for a short while (which is the emergency heat kicking in) but mostly it tries to draw what heat is available outside to indoors.  When it's 14 degrees and most of the day is below freezing, there's not much heat to draw in, so it blows cold air.

Honestly, I don't mind the cold as long as I can be warm inside.  I'd much rather cold weather than the oppressive heat of the summer, but still, down here we aren't used to it being this cold.