Human memory is far from perfect.<\/p>\n
During the winter of 1988-1989, I was renting a small office on Ottawa’s Bank Street with my business partner John. We spent many a late night working on a difficult project, and it was one cold winter. I distinctly remember one night when the temperature dipped to \u221236 degrees Centigrade, and I not only had a hard time starting my car (only to rush back to the building to warm up and then run out to the car again after a few minutes in the hope that it would have warmed up a little by then) but its engine never reached its normal operating temperature during the 10 km drive home.<\/p>\n
Except that it never happened. The -36\u00b0C, that is. The coldest historical temperature I can find for that winter is \u221227.2\u00b0C, which occurred in early March 1989; earlier, in January, it went down to \u221227.0\u00b0C one night.<\/p>\n
I also distinctly remember that the first winter my wife spent here in Ottawa, she was renting a stall on the Byward Market and that on Christmas Eve day, the temperature never climbed above \u221224\u00b0C.<\/p>\n
Again, never happened. On December 24, 1992, the high temperature was +2.7\u00b0C. Perhaps a year later, then? Yes, that was a cold Christmas Eve day, but not near that cold; the high temperature was -10.0\u00b0C.<\/p>\n
Then there is that very cold winter in Budapest that I recall. It was brutal; my old Lada’s engine half froze. Eventually I managed to get it running without overheating, and then I spent half the night looking for a gas station that was selling antifreeze. Eventually I found one, way outside of Budapest. I do recall hearing on the radio that the temperature was -29\u00b0C. It wasn’t… according to the historical weather records that I can locate, the coldest night was on February 12, 1985, with a temperature of \u221224\u00b0C. Brutally cold by Budapest standards to be sure, but still 5 degrees warmer than what I remember.<\/p>\n
At least I do know for a fact that today, the temperature reached +36\u00b0C. I think I owe an extra prayer of thanks to the gods of air conditioning.<\/p>\n Human memory is far from perfect. During the winter of 1988-1989, I was renting a small office on Ottawa’s Bank Street with my business partner John. We spent many a late night working on a difficult project, and it was one cold winter. I distinctly remember one night when the temperature dipped to \u221236 degrees […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","category-weather","category-35-id","category-34-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2194"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2201,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2194\/revisions\/2201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}