Cars plugged in to wooden posts are reminescent of the hitching racks of the old West. Is this what recharging an electric car looks like? Well, no, actually. Parking lots around the city here have plugs available in order to plug in the heater core of the car while it's parked. It's not so necessary in today's relatively balmy above zero temperatures, but just last week the daily temps were in the minus 20's, and I imagine the plugs were all in use. The oil and coolant in the car's engine needs to be warm enough to circulate properly when starting the engine. A heater is installed on the engine in order to do this, and the dangling plug is a tell-tale sign you are in an area where the weather gets pretty cold!
People have to plug in their cars in Alaska!
This is the hitchin post for cars to plug in to.
Yesterday morning I couldn't wait to get outside and see....Alaska! Well, see what was outside our hotel here in Fairbanks, anyway. The first thing I noticed was the sound of the snow. It squeaked under my feet as I walked around and I wondered if one could tell something about the temperature by the sound of the snow. A little digging around on the Internet gave me the information that squeakiness indicates cold, dry snow. When it's not too terribly cold, the pressure of your foot on the snow causes a little of the snow to melt as you step, allowing the crystals to slide and keep things pretty quiet. But when it gets colder outside, apparently around 14 degrees and less, the snow is too cold to melt under a mere footstep, and so the snow crystals just break and the resultant sound is best described as squeaky. Sure enough, the temperature yesterday morning was a brisk and dry 10 degrees. Thanks, archives of Minnesota Public Radio. Back home in the mountains of North Carolina, you can judge the outside temperature by the amount of curl of the rhododendron leaves. Basically, the tighter the curl, the colder it is. Starting at around freezing, the rhododendron leaves can go from flat and droopy, to curling, to curling up so small as to be about as big around as a pencil. If you've got rhododendrons in your yard or near where you live you can check the leaves next time it gets to freezing and below. See if you can correlate the amount of curl to the temperature on your thermometer. It's great to be familiar enough with cues outside to begin to be able to tell a little about the weather and conditions even if you don't have some sort of measuring device handy. I can imagine that there are many cues about outside conditions the local people here in Alaska recognize. Information downloaded from:
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/updraft/archive/2010/01/why_does_snow_squeak_underfoot.shtml Why does snow squeak underfoot?