No, I didn’t cardboard my rad. I never get around to it until it’s cold enough to actually matter, and at that point it’s too cold to do it. 
Thing was, that morning my temp gauge was up high enough that the air should have been warm, but it was ice cold (well, colder than that, actually). So I’m theorizing that my coolant mixture is a bit off, and the coolant in the heater core was a bit gelled and wasn’t circulating. The problem hasn’t recurred in the subsequent above -40 temps, so I’m not going to lose sleep over it. Cold snaps in February rarely hit -45.
Does happy dance
It hit zero, it hit zero!!
Don’t get me wrong, I love winter. I’m like Eggerhaus’s kid. I planned on student teaching in Northern Alaska (before I decided I didn’t want to teach), live for snowball fights and snow tubing.
But DAMN it’s been cold.
LilMiss has been throwing hissyfits seeing so many schools delayed or closed, knowing that her school district never closes. They follow the Minneapolis School District which has closed maybe 3 times in the past 20 years. Poor kid. Happy mom.
Just to contribute : a little New England joke
Coming from a mediterranean wheather I enjoyed -40 w/wind chill as a enlightning and refeshing experience: Don’t take your chances with nature.
My admiration for Canadians, Eskimos and other crazy people is way up.
Funny you should say that, because I had a real Canadian moment this morning. Getting up to go to a class, I looked at the temp on the weather channel, and said to my husband, with absolutely no irony, “Oh, great, it’s up to -21°C.”
(french frog, I’ve seen that joke before with “Saskatchewan” substituted for “New England”. And “pick-ups” substituted for “cahs”. :D)
A few years ago I was living in the Washington DC area and we had temps in the single digits F (about -15C – I realize it’s not the same thing as -40, but it was still damn cold) and had one hand in a big clunky cast so I couldn’t put a glove on over it. I discovered that two wool socks pulled over the hand makes a terrific substitute glove. In fact, I would have worn them on both hands had I been able to use my thumb on the other hand.
Papa Tiger, who grew up 80 miles south of the Canadian border in northern Minnesota (who wants me to tell you that the Winter Carnival is in St. Paul, NOT Minneapolis!), says a doormat in front of the radiator is the wind-blocker of choice to keep the cold air from blowing in so the radiator can head up. (He also headed south, and finds our current location, New Orleans, to be not quite warm enough – Guam was just perfect, but Singapore was a bit too hot for him).
[Darth Vader] Come over to the cold side, Tripler. You have the cold in you… [/Darth Vader]
And the Riders substituted for the Red Sox, no doubt?
I didn’t realize there are so many people with Saskatchewan connections here! Some blizzard yesterday, with the resulting digging out this morning. I opened my front door and there was a snow bank three feet high just waiting for me and my shovel. After the weather earlier in the week, though, it was actually quite nice by the time I finished the shovelling this afternoon - no wind and sunny. The current -26 with -37 windchill feels almost balmy. 
I just stepped outside to run to the store real quick.
We have no degrees.
That’s right, I said no degrees. The thermometer said “0”. We have no degrees. Hell, I had a hard enough time lighting the grill this afternoon - so fuckin’ cold the regulator on my propane tank froze up.
Tripler
And with shrinkage like this, it’s no wonder I can’t get any.