One degree Farenheit!

I am the first to admit I love the snow and the winter months. I like the hot months too, but I can always put on more clothes to get warm. I can't always take off more to get cool, and even though last summer found me outside sitting in our tiny wading pool without a top (Germans think nothing of this type of behavior) it was still hot. Ooops, I'm getting off the subject..

I love the snow and the winter with the darker nights and the shorter days not because I'm some emo/gothic person but because it is just the other side of the coin of nature and the cycles of the Earth. (Also having grown up in the south in America a cold winter for months on end is new to me!)

This morning it was ONE degree farenheit here. Germans tell temperatures in celcius and I just can't understand it, so I always have to go to either a conversion site, or one that gives the forecast in farenheit. No matter how you view it, this morning was just about the coldest I think I have experienced.

The high today should be around 16 degrees farenheit, and the extended forecast doesn't mention any temperatures above freezing for the next 5 days.

Heartworms in dogs are non-existent here, and I think these marvelous extended freezing temperatures play a part in that. Also fleas are not a problem, and only in the very undisturbed and deep woods are ticks something to watch for and then only in the summer. This also helps keep out bugs that want to come inside and bother people - like the horrible roaches, or "Palmetto bugs" in America. I'm not talking about the roaches that come into a dirty house, they are so small and easily dealt with, I mean those great big giant nasty flying ones that are at least 2 inches long. Everyone in Texas and Arkansas - during a cold winter - says the temperature will help kill off the roaches, but those things have been around since prehistoric times I think! They can survive a cold snap like the south sometimes gets, but I don't think they could survive snow and ice and weeks of freezing temps.

Once when I was 16, one of those giant flying Palmetto roaches got inside. I was alone, and had to try to deal with it myself. It launched itself right at my face, and it was only instinct and reflexes that kicked in to help me bat it out of the air to the floor. (The floor was covered in that horrible '70's avacado green shag carpet) I stepped on it. It was still moving. I danced on it! It wiggled it's antennas at me in time to the dance beat. I was suddenly really interested in exactly what this giant bug could survive from a sort of detached scientific standpoint.

So I took a set of encyclopedias and stacked them on top of the bug (after putting a baggie on top of it to protect the first book from any squished bug guts) I was sure that weight and no oxygen would kill it, but to make sure, I left it under that heavy stack of books for 24 hours.

The next day, I removed the books and the baggie, and it looked really flat...but as I watched it sort of poofed itself back up and started to walk away. Eeeee-damn-gads! This was no ordinary bug, this was some sort of indestructible super bug! My scientific viewpoint came back, and I wondered if it could survive if it was frozen. So I herded it into the baggie, sealed it up after getting as much air out as I could, and put it in the freezer.

I left it in there for about 36 hours before I took it out. It did indeed look dead then, but by this time I didn't trust it, and I took it outside (it was summer in Houston) and dumped it and the few ice crystals that were inside the baggie with it out on the sidewalk to see what would happen, or if it was "clearly most sincerely dead" (to quote a lyric from a song from "The Wizard of Oz").

I watched it for only a few minutes before I heard the phone ringing inside my apartment. I ran to answer it, and was gone perhaps 5 minutes. When I went back out to check on the frozen roach, it was gone, with only a tiny trail of rapidly evaporating moisture on the sidewalk to show me in which direction it had gone.

Well, that was it for me! I didn't hunt for it, I didn't want to see what else it could survive, I only wanted it to go away and never come back! I was also more than a little upset at my experiments on it - I have never been the type of person to hurt anything on purpose, or pull wings off flies or anything like that, and once it occurred to me that I had been subjecting that giant roach to situations that it didn't like, I felt a little bad. I was glad it had gone away and disappeared. I guess he and I both learned something from his unfortunate visit to my place back in 1972.

Anyway...no bugs here in the deep sleep of the deep freeze of mid-winter in Germany! :)