Wrapped tight
Winters are very mild in Mississippi. It seldom even dips below freezing, and it’s a common sight to see people (who are firmly in their right minds) walking about in short sleeves in the middle of winter. So imagine the chaos when a sub-freezing temperature cold front arrived and sat on top of us for about a week. I’m talking cats and dogs living together–mass hysteria! It definitely dropped below freezing–at night it was in the teens with wind chill sometimes reaching single digits–and stayed there for 4 (I think) days straight. Compounding the misery were multiple water pipe ruptures around Jackson, causing Jackson to be without water altogether for a few days and under boil water alert for a couple weeks. Kids got out of school, and porta-potties were de rigueur downtown where water was mostly unavailable for the better part of at least a week; longer in some places.
This was by far the coldest it’s been in Mississippi that I can remember since arriving in 1994. It’s certainly the coldest it’s been since Denise and I moved back to the Jackson Metro area, since this is the first time we’ve wrapped our outdoor faucets since we bought this house. And it was almost too late too. Just outside our kitchen is an outdoor faucet that had gotten so cold that it froze the water at that junction preventing us from using the kitchen faucet, dish- and clothes-washing machines, and water dispenser in the refrigerator. I didn’t know it had frozen over until I tried to turn on the water at night to drip so it wouldn’t freeze and nothing came out. But in the morning we took a space heater out there and blew warm air on the outdoor faucet for a few minutes, which loosened things up. Having learned our lesson, we quickly bundled it up with some towels and plastic bags. The pic above is our other outdoor faucet, which was thankfully not frozen but we wrapped it anyway.
So Nifty was here to witness this historic event–The Big Chill of 2010. It might not get this cold again in decades. Or it might again in a couple weeks; who knows. In the midst of crunch time for work I had to cool down my overheated brain, and what better way to do so than to step outside with Nifty and take some shots. Right outside our house the street gutters were iced over with flowing water underneath. I figured I’d try to get some interesting shots of that. I was going to get some photos of ice, but Denise told me about the water flowing under the ice and I knew I had to get out there. Ice in the streets in Mississippi! Might as well have seen Bigfoot. I grabbed some shots, sometimes lying down on the street, I’m sure to the amusement of drivers passing by. Anything for you, Nifty my man! I might not have taken him very many exciting places, but I put my body on the line for him. Could’ve been run over by a car doing all this lying down in the street nonsense. Here are a few shots:
Ice
Bubbles under ice
Icy delta
I should’ve driven around looking for other ways to document The Big Chill of 2010, but I was crazy-busy and, well… it was freezing!