And the audience replies: “How cold is it?”

It’s so damn cold I get to write a blog post about how damn cold it is and not feel like I’m complaining about the weather. And I’m not going to complain. How about that?

Despite the brisk drive down the short stretch of highway that leads to my office, meandering at about half speed the whole way and passing numerous vehicles including, a jackknifed semi, in the center median, I am cuddled up in the relative warmth of work, the soft bask of a computer monitor on my face. I get to look out from four stories into the air to the east and see a normally unsightly scattering of industrial buildings gently seeping tufted white tails of exhaust from their overworked heating systems. In someways it’s a bit of post-industrial, post-modern art. I should have a video camera.

I would have immediately buckled down to the tasks at hand, but I witnessed something both subtle and bizarre this morning that I needed — NEEDED — to write it down and share. You are probably considering the vast array of options available to me at the moment and wondering what exactly could have struck my awe and curiosity enough on such a winter morning to stand head and shoulders above those ranking as much more mundane and by far more expected on a brisk winter, post-blizzard morning.

Such as it is, this particular tale is (as I previously said) very simple and in fact most subtle, and had I not looked just at the right moment I might have missed it.

As a very well-trained car owner, I loaded my trunk, opened the garage door and started my vehicle. It is important on cold mornings even when a vehicle is sitting in a garage, especially an unheated one, to idle for a minute or two to ensure the even distribution of oils and fluids that may have otherwise settled or began to thicken inside the engine. It should be noted that our garage is neither heated nor insulated, though it does sit tight against the house sharing a wall and a ceiling with other warmer parts of the structure. As such, and thanks to the temperature sensor in my car, I’ve deduced that the differentials in heat are something like this: A pleasant twenty degrees inside a toasty house, a bone-chilling minus thirty degrees outside in the light wind, and a frustrating but tolerable evenly-sloping gradient between about minus zero-point-one degrees and minus eight degrees, front to back, in the garage-proper. Closer to the house, where there is more general radiation of heat from the house itself, it is a little bit warmer than nearer to the garage doors where the general opening and closing and also large potential for heat-loss due to a two-car garage door seam.

But enough of my shallow analysis of the heat distribution properties of my garage; what you need to take away from my explanation is this: right up near the edge of the house, inside the garage, the temperature was just hanging a fraction of a degree from the freezing point. That means that anything else sitting on, say, my workbench pushed up against the house was at about the same temperature. So, for example, the two bottles of water sitting on the workbench were — molecularly speaking — like perfectly balanced scales, tottering between liquid and solid. This is exactly what I am going to assume, at least. Because as I was sitting in the car waiting for it to warm up the two water bottles caught my attention just — literally, just — as the scales tipped. Something akin to the clouds of exhaust spewing from the building out my office window was witnessed: a transition occurred in the water visually, over a mere handful of heartbeats, as if a puff of smoke inside the water itself. In a matter of seconds the water in the bottle froze solid. I even got out my car to verify. Blink.

Now, you’ve probably reached this point in the story and are asking: “What the…? Is that all? He wasted five minutes of my time telling me how a bottle of water froze?” And you would be completely right in doing so. But remember, when someone from afar asks you to relate to them how cold it was outside this winter, you can say: “I know this guy, and he saw a water bottle freeze almost instantly. Really. I’m telling the truth.”

And you will be.