A Hard Freeze

As I write this, a weather warning has been posted for my area about a possible Hard Freeze tonight with a possible Hard Freeze tomorrow night. To the folks up north, this means nothing other than -- It's winter, what do you expect?

But down here in the sunny South, we're not even sure what the weatherman means when he (or she) says that we're going to have a Hard Freeze.

So, I had to look it up. For my neighbors, that means temperatures below 25 degrees are possible for two hours or more tonight.

So what? some might ask. The "so what" is that this is the kind of freeze that destroys seasonal vegetation. Fortunately, I can't grow anything but silk plants, so this won't cause any major damage to my gardening efforts, but there are real crops out there that might suffer.

We get these so rarely that I'll probably have to look the term up again during the next Hard Freeze warning.

'Til then, I'm off to make sure that the heater is on after today's high of 72 degrees.