We're Not Used To This

This much cold this early in the year is something we are just not accustomed to here in the Pacific Northwest. This is a bottle of Diet Coke that was left out on the deck because the refrigerator was full of Thanksgiving food. It was plenty cold out there - the Coke is frozen solid.

Tho I should point out that this is Diet Coke.  Regular Coke has a lot of dissolved sugar in it, which lowers the freezing point (dissolving anything in water lowers its freezing point and raises its boiling point).  The beer, wine and other non-diet bottles stored out on the deck did not freeze.  Thankfully, since there are a lot of glass bottles out there.

In fact, as I write this, it is still below freezing outside and has been so continuously since last Friday.  This is our second cold snap of the year.  Thankfully, our two heating plant failures on Eolian, both associated with sea water supply and not with the heat pump itself,  have been corrected.  The first of these was the near-complete clogging of the strainer that the heat pump sea water passes thru, accompanied by the screen completely falling apart when I touched it - now replaced.  The second I already wrote about. 

I think we'd all welcome a return to more seasonable temperatures here.  And I really feel for the rest of the country, which is experiencing winter in earnest.

We're Not Used To This