Frosted window

Winter has arrived in North Dakota. There is a little snow, a lot of wind, and cold temperatures with sub-zero wind chills. This is weather where one buttons up their coat and shrinks down inside it. The temperature today never got above zero Fahrenheit. The weather man is predicting we won't get above zero until next Tuesday. At least the sky was clear and the sun shone brightly today. It looked warm even though it wasn't.

I believe I had mentioned that my brother's newer pickup had shifting problems last week. This past Monday he took his old pickup to a repair shop to have a couple heater cables replaced and he has been driving it ever since.

Last night after we left mom at Manor Care my brother's old pickup had several problems. First, the pickup didn't want to start in the cold night air. Eventually it turned over and started. *whew* But then we had another problem: the heater's blower didn't work. Two warm bodies in the cold air of the pickup cab meant the inside of the windows were rapidly frosting up, not to mention there was no heat blown out of the heater.

Our breaths hung white in the still cold air inside the pickup. That was better than being outside where the cold wind whipped our breath away.

It was after 9 pm, little traffic was on the road, and the outer lights lit the way. We drove home on the back streets to further reduce sharing the road with other vehicles. We tried to avoid scraping the window as the frost would come back more solid and not as speckled.

We found that as the pickup warmed up our forward driving movement would encourage warm air to flow out the defrost vents. Soon small circular areas were clearing on the driver's and passenger's sides of the window. By the time we got home the clear spots were relatively large and we could see out the window without scrunching down low.

After we got home, and my brother had swept the dusting of snow off the driveway, he banged a few times on the pickup's dash and the blower started to work. *argh!* We're guys and are suppose to bang on things to make them work. Why didn't we think of that in the beginning?