Minus 16°F

It’s frickin’ cold. Simone’s feeling it, and we’re feeling it. Co-workers here at the office live in the same area as Simone (a couple a bit further south) and said that this morning at 6:00 it read -16°F on their thermometer this morning (yes, that’s minus sixteen — that’s -27°C for the rest of the world). We had about eight below when I got to the office this morning.

The company I work for manages 175 vacation homes in Sunriver, and while we inspect our homes weekly, we were concerned about the sudden cold snap and the affect it could have on furnaces, water lines, pipes, etc… in our homes, especially our older ones. We wanted to make sure that if there were problems, we took care of them before the onslaught of tourists hit next week. So we basically sent all our staff today out to check the heat in all our homes and make checks on every faucet, hot tub, and source of heat in the home to make sure things aren’t frozen up — especially in some of our older homes. It’s just now 12:45, and we’ve already discovered five frozen up homes, and the day’s not even half-way done yet (and we’re maybe a third of the way through our homes). Not only that, but some of the main water lines and meters for this homes are buried under snow. We just got a report from a field staff member trying to get to the water meter and he can’t as the local snow plow geniuses buried the thing in a now six-foot-tall berm of snow. Everything’s repairable, and I’m just glad we’re discovering this now and not next week, that’s for sure.

It’s going to be a long few days, like Simone said, this winter is certainly shaping up to be a lot like 1992 (though we had much more snow by this time that year, if I remember correctly).