As many of you may know, there was that incredibly cold polar vortex that came to visit much of the United States earlier this week. In Madison, Wisconsin the high for Monday had been -9F. That would be without windchill factored in. I believe it got close to -40F with windchill, give or take. It was cold enough that after about five minutes outside frostbite was a very real possibility. Tuesday wasn't much warmer, the high had been 2F. There was still a pretty frosty windchill going on that day. On Monday all the schools in Wisconsin closed, or at least almost all of them, schools followed suit for Tuesday too since the weather advisory did not end until noon Tuesday.
Some of my siblings and I did some science experiments in this super cold weather. One of the experiments was the throwing boiling water into the air to see it freeze instantly. And yes one of us did get burned. My brother had successfully thrown the boiling water into the air a few times, but the time he got burned was due to him overfilling the cup from his electric tea kettle (we brought it outside with us to keep the water hot). Poor brother :(! We also attempted to see how long it took for cold water to freeze, but got impatient and gave up. The final experiment we did was blowing bubbles into the frigid air--they are supposed to freeze and look very neat. The first few attempts were done with homemade bubbles, so we thought maybe it wasn't successful because they were homemade and the recipe I used called for the bubbles to sit for a day, but SCIENCE! So we eventually got real bubbles, and it sort of worked, but we did the trials later on in the evening on Tuesday and thought that perhaps it wasn't cold enough any longer.
Tuesday I discovered why heet is an important factor in helping my car start. It took several tries and several hours in between to get my car to finally start. My siblings and I went on a quest to find heet to put in my car, figuring it at least wouldn't hurt to add. We went to several places: Walmart, BP gas station, Woodmans (grocery store), O'Reilly Auto Parts, Sears Auto Center, and Metcalfe's Market (another grocery store, we were kind of thinking no one would think of looking there). All of these places were out!
This is at O'Reilly Auto Parts, it's hard to see, but there is a sign on the door that says
Sorry We Have No Heet
We asked someone at the Sears Auto Center if they had any suggestions on what we could do to help get the car started. He suggested pushing it into a garage, which we had considered doing; or get a hair dryer and hold it over the starter--I totally don't know what or where the starter is so that one didn't help me much. After Metcalfe's we went back to try again, I had to work at 3:30 so I really needed to know if my car was going to start! After trying a few more times and pumping the gas it finally started. Woot. I finally got to put my spare key to use, locking my car up while it ran for a good 15 minutes or so before finally leaving my brother's apartment.
As a silly note, for most of this time (Sunday evening to Tuesday afternoon) I was totally being twelve and having a sleepover at my brother's apartment. My oldest sister was in town for a few more days before she had to fly back to Singapore, so we decided to have an epic sleepover that ended up going longer than expected because of the cold. We watched a few episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000, Sharknado, Two-Headed Shark Attack, Jersey Shore Shark Attack, and Paranormal Activity 3 and 4 amidst all of our science experiments. It was good fun :D!
Thanks for reading,
Melissa
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