No getting the impression this is a sunny Florida day. In true Canadian fashion, the sun is brightly shining, but notice the sweaters and jackets. This is a record cold spell and may be the first time in decades Florida has plunged below zero. Expensive as it is, 40% of the world’s orange juice still comes from this area. I’m not an orchardist, but I hear the fruit can only survive down to 28 F, and even then not for long.
Did I say orange juice was expensive in Florida? Dern tootin’ it is. That’s like asking if computers are cheap in California or salmon is cheap in British Columbia. This cold spell is timed exactly right to make the unloading of a large truck that much more difficult. Nobody has any winter gear, I don’t even have gloves any longer. Plus, it is well known as soon as you buy a jacket or a space heater, it will warm up for the next ten years and you’ve wasted your cash.
Theresa and I have gone over some details about the flyer. Basically it is a go provided we can get a wide-carriage printer. Wow, there is an out-dated term! What I meant was a printer that can produce 11”x17” printouts. Wide-carriage, that is really dating myself. Those were printers that used the wide fan-fold paper, and they had their purpose in the 1980s and I owned one of the first models. The width was calculated by the number of “pica” sized characters, 80 for standard paper, 120 for wide paper. If you looked closely, the wide paper was just the narrow paper turned sideways.
Now want to know what pica means. It was a font used on typewriters that output ten letters per inch. The only other common font was “elite”, with twelve letters per inch. Early printers emulated these two fonts, but my beautiful printer could also print them in bold, italics and, if you wanted to wait long enough, NLQ (Near Letter Quality). That is you printer history lesson. Let’s talk about the cold.
It is the record cold spell of the century. Many people, like the ones around here too cheap (or dumb) to buy space heaters, get stuck holed up in expensive motels. Shoulda bought the heater. Florida hotels love cold weather. You can see the empty streets all around here? The houses around here are not that well insulted (oops, Freudian slip, my proofreader says I meant "insulated"), being that one does not need as much stuffing in the walls to cool a house as to heat it. This also means the buildings here suffer the deep-freeze effect. My Canadian readers know exactly what I’m talking about.
Myself, I’ve totally forgotten cold weather, not really having seen it in decades. We’ve got a truck to unload in the worst conditions in memory, and all the metal parts are too cold to touch. Generally, Theresa is taking just the live-a-day things out of the truck and the rest goes into storage. The problem is, those things are not at the rear of the vehicle and it is freaking Wallace out that we have to unload so much to get at things.
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