It hasn't happened for several years now. I haven't needed to know where my window scraper was hiding in the car, much less whether I still had my old one, not since moving down to Arizona.
They say it's not just the heat, but that it's a dry heat. Well, winters here are pretty much the same with lack of humidity making a big difference. It has on very rare occasions dipped below freezing. We've even had a night or two here and there where we had to mind the house water pipes, now that they've been rerouted to the outside of the house after that slab leak our first winter here. Sure, the pipes have foam and tape around them, but the summer sun and heat do a job on those so they need to be regularly checked at minimum. Still, we get the cold on rare occasions.
But we very rarely also get any humidity at the same time. It takes something other than desert dry air to frost car windows. Two nights ago we had a valley-wide freeze warning. No frost accompanied it. Last night, there was no freeze warning, with temperatures anticipated to dip to 33. That's above, for those of you like my brother's family who just had -35 the other night in northern Minnesota.
With that forecast I was surprised to come out of the house this morning on my way to the club shortly before 9 to find all the windows on the car frosted over. Apparently we had humidity also. Most likely it was emerging from the ground, due to recent rains. Nothing was falling overnight. Skies were even clear enough to even see part of Pleiades overhead! This in the sky I often refer to as giving us a great view of about 14 stars each night.
Since it was my turn to unlock the club's door, I was pretty much in a hurry. Lucky for me, strange as that may seem, it had rained several times over a few days earlier. The first rain after several months to fall was the one that brought all the dust, cleaning it from the air and depositing it everywhere. Car windows are where it shows, all spotted and speckled once they dry. I had to go into the hatch under the floor where a jack and spare tire never got placed and pull out the scraper after that rain to squeegee the windows back to a state of offering visibility before they dried to white spots. I was in a hurry to open the club that day too, and the scraper never made it back into the spare tire well. That not only saved me time then, but again this morning, since we carry a case of water bottles back there which has to be hauled out and returned for any access under the hatch floor. This time the scraper was where I tossed it, on the floor of the back seat.
I actually had the impulse to head back in the house, grab my camera, and shoot some photos of not only the frost patterns, but the fact of them as well. But since I was running late and was the one with the key today, I allowed myself a half second of remorse and scraped away. Who knows? It may happen again down here some day, where I can get a shot of frost patterns in the foreground with palms and saguaros in the background.
Really! Maybe someday. Not that I'm asking....
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