Wearing shoes with holes in them is not a good way to stay warm on a morning when the temperature has dropped to a record low of 20F for December 15  here on the Crystal Coast.

The tiny piece of good news in all this cold weather is that we seem to be warming up much faster than yesterday.  At 10:30 AM we are already at 31F so we should easily get beyond 32F well before noon today.

This has been a very cold week, but if you are here in the Bogue Sound area at least you can be thankful you did not spend a lot of money for a Florida vacation to duck all the cold.

Records for low temperatures have been falling all across Florida.

In fact if you look at this interactive map you can see that there have been a lot of record lows in last week.  The map gets even more colorful if you add the records for low maximum temperatures.

While this is cold weather for area, my Canadian years taught me never to worry about cold weather as long as the temperatures go along with the sun.

When you really need to hibernate is when the temperature is dropping all day long even as the sun is trying as hard as it can can to warm the air.

On our snowy farm north of Fredericton, New Brunswick, we would often have a stretch of weather which would start one morning with a temperature of 20F.   It would fall to 10F by sunset and by the next morning it would be at 0F. 

By sunset that afternoon, the temperature would be down to minus 10F. The next morning it would be minus 20F.  Once it got down that low, you might just lose two or three degrees a day until it bottomed out and just stayed there for a few days.  Once we saw if drop to minus forty.

So as we make our way up to plus forty this afternoon,  I am just going to remember that it could be a lot worse. In fact I have seen it eighty degrees colder and a wind on top of that.

I just talked to someone who has family snowed in on a mountain in Boone.  That is a whole lot worse than staring at the frozen gut behind my house from the warmth of our kitchen.

There is also a real danger to the north and west us of an icy-snowy mix of precipitation starting this evening.  Right now it looks like we will escape the worst of it.

I can tolerate snow, but ice is not a nice visitor. 

If this weather keeps up, I might have to switch to my winter sneakers. Stay warm and pray for more open water in our creeks and rivers.

The Southern Outer Banks is still a pretty good place to hide from the worst of winter.