Arctic Blast

Remember the other day, when I stayed home because it was -17 when I got up? Today it is -22, again, three hours after I got up. The weather people keep calling this an "arctic blast" and then laughing in that smug, fake-sympathetic way, as if they could bring warmer air if they felt like it, but they know what's good for us, and it's this cold. It's hung around long enough that they've exhausted their tiny vocabularies (arctic, frigid, and bitter cold) and also their usefulness.
There has been some news of "weather rage." It's only human, though, to get kind of cranky when you can't go outside for more than two minutes without getting frostbite. I went out with the dogs and my teeth had goosebumps.
Aside from the weather people, my short temper is directed at those who are dumb about the cold. I recognize that it is irrational and unproductive, but I get annoyed at the girl waiting for a bus with me in SUBZERO temperatures who was not only too vain/fashionable to wear a hat, but had no gloves, no scarf, and only a pair of strappy, open-toed high heels (no socks) on her feet. If it had been warm enough to move my scarf off of my face to speak, I would have verbalized what was going loudly through my head: really? REALLY?!? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? That was the other day. Now that it's dipping to -24 and lower at night, some of our pipes are freezing, and my irritability is directed at the former owner of this house, who thought it was a bright idea to run water pipes to the upstairs bathroom by way of the UNHEATED BACK PORCH. Luckily, nothing has burst, and we've managed to thaw them out again with a space heater, but it's still got me wandering around the house, unbathed, in my ratty wool sweater like a crazy woman muttering REALLY?!? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? and scheming about rerouting the pipes myself. The crazy is exacerbated by the fact that I've been wearing the same outfit every day for about a week, occasionally accessorizing it with one slipper (I left the other one under the bed at the cabin) and mittens and a cocoa mustache, since tap water is frankly too cold to drink. Also by the fact that my skin has had it with this weather - it's trying to secede from my body and escape to warmer climes, and refuses to stop cracking and bleeding and peeling and itching no matter how much lotion I put on it or how much cocoa I drink. I also just finished Northern Lights by Tim O'Brien, which involves some people getting lost in a blizzard in MN and nearly freezing/starving to death. I thought I had snapped when I spotted a midget sneaking around our house yesterday, but I'm pretty sure it was just the meter-reader.
Cross your fingers for me and hope that it warms up before I lose it completely.