I live in New York City and I can’t remember the last time I left my apartment just to take a stroll.
If I walk out that door, it’s because I need food or because I have a previous obligation; work or social. The reason I’m not willingly going outdoors isn’t that I’m lazy (although that isn’t helping), it’s because the temperature has been hovering around freezing for nearly two months straight.
DON’T MISS: These are the apps that are killing your phone’s battery life
N.R. Kleinfield wrote an article for The New York Times on Friday discussing February’s ridiculous average temperature of just 24 degrees. According to the National Weather Service, that’s about 11 degrees below the standard February average, and has a decent chance of clocking in as the coldest February in New York City since 1934.
This vivid paragraph from Kleinfield just about sums up the winter in its entirety so far:
“It has been so cold that it is cold in places where it is not usually cold. Like subway platforms. It has been so cold people feel as if they are under house arrest on their days off. It has been so cold that you need so much time to pile on the layers of clothing and then time to remove the layers when you get there that you need to factor in extra hours for all the body enclosure work. It has been so cold that children want to be home-schooled.”
Kleinfield concedes that NYC isn’t the only city slogging its way through this winter — Boston, for example, has received enough snow to last it for the next few decades — but we’re still desperately ready for it to end.
Thankfully, if the forecast is to be believed, spring might finally be putting up a fight against this frigid, endless winter: the high on Monday is 43.
