December 30, 2003
I have always been the type of guy who's never minded cold weather. When I was little, my Mom was always imploring me, often in angry tones with the use of my middle name, to put on my coat. At my Bay Area college, when my warm-weather friends were cursing Mother Nature for temps plummeting all the way -- gasp! -- into the 50s, I would mock them for being "warm-weather wimps."
I was from Reno, dammit, where it gets truly cold. Cold, I explained to them, was when your nose felt like it would fall off after being outside for a mere few minutes. Cold was temperatures in single digits. Cold was when your boogers froze, gosh darn it.
And even when it was legitimately cold, well, then I didn't mind. From the perspective of a middle-class guy who has always had a roof over his head and materials with which to keep warm, getting cold was always an excuse to warm up. And there are some VERY nifty ways to warm up, as we all know.
Then, I made the mistake of moving to the desert southwest.
For more than two years, I've been away from Reno, first in Las Vegas, and now in Tucson. As you know, the weather is generally quite different in those places than it is in Reno. For about half of the year, this difference sucks, because it gets hotter than hell in Las Vegas and Tucson. When it's 104 in the middle of the summer in Reno, it's a massive, record-breaking heat wave. When it's 104 in the middle of the summer in Las Vegas or Tucson, it's a cooling trend.
But the other half of the year, when Reno gets cold, Tucson and Las Vegas are generally quite nifty. Reno gets snow; Tucson and Las Vegas don't (except for freakish exceptions). It freezes almost every night during Reno winters; here, it only freezes during cold spells. Case in point: A week or so ago, it hit 80 in Tucson.
Anyway, this weather in the desert southwest is all well and good, except for one thing: It's turned me into one of the warm-weather wimps I used to endlessly chastise back in my college days.
I spent last Tuesday through Sunday in Reno, home to spend the holiday with friends and family. This was lovely. The weather during Christmas was, however, decidedly not lovely, at least in my book. This is how much I've changed; before, I kept my fingers crossed for a white Christmas. This year, when the snow started falling on Dec. 25, I started muttering very un-Christmaslike phrases under my breath.
I was driving my Mom's 1994 Mercury Grand Marquis. I've written about this car before, specifically about how it hates me. (Last Memorial Day, while I was driving it, it died literally in the middle of the McCarran Boulevard/South Virginia Street intersection. I was nearly killed; no problem was ever found, and since then, the car has purred like a kitten for Mom.) Aside from its homicidal tendencies toward me, it's a delightful machine. Anyway, I found myself scraping snow off of this car on Christmas Day, my fingers chilled to the bone, and my brain contemplating all the ways the car could use the snowy weather to finish me off.
That's when it hit me that I truly have changed. I am no longer a cold-loving person. I was dreaming of 80-degree temperatures, not devising ways to warm up creatively.
In any case, the car managed to refrain from killing me, and although the snow went away, during the remainder of my trip, it got even colder. According to Weather.com, the low the day after Christmas in Reno was 23 degrees; on Saturday, it was a frigid 15 degrees, warming up to a balmy 18 degrees on Sunday, before I left. And while I was truly sorry to leave Sparks/Reno, a town I adore filled with people I love, I was not going to miss the weather.
I got on the plane and came back to Tucson. It turns out that Southern Arizona was in the midst of a cold spell. You know what the low was on Monday, my first post-holiday morning back in Tucson?
A stunning 19 degrees. I think it set a record.
If this keeps up, I'll lose my warm weather wimp status in no time.
Jimmy Boegle is a fifth-generation Nevadan in exile in Arizona who still adores the song "White Christmas" even if he isn’t wild about the concept anymore. Jimmy's column appears here Tuesdays, and he can be reached via e-mail at jiboegle@stanfordalumni.org.