We are in a deep freeze.

The temperature outside in Dallas, Texas, is 34 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). My handheld says, with the north wind a’blowing, it feels like 24 F (-4 C). My face almost froze on my walk earlier today.

I know I shouldn’t complain.

It is much colder up north. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, where I was born (the coldest spot in Iowa), the temperature is 25 F (-4 C), and it feels like 12 F (-11 C). In Burnsville, Minnesota, where my sister and her family are inside shivering under a mound of  blankets, even with the sun shining, the outside is only 22 F (-6 C), and it feels like 10 F (-12 C), and, to add insult to injury, its been snowing.

Ok, ok, that’s the north.

This is the south. This is Texas, not Iowa or Minnesota. South of the Red River, things are supposed to be warmer. It’s not halfway through November, and the inflatable Thanksgiving turkey on my next-door neighbor’s front lawn is flatter than a pancake with frostbite. Squirrels are in hiding beneath their hoarded nuts (the little monsters – those are our pecans), and the birds have left for the Caribbean to sun on beaches and sip from fancy bird baths floating with little colored umbrellas.

Here, on the street, no one moves. It looks like outer space.

Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is in outer space. Presently, it is about 316 million miles from Earth, give or take a million or so miles. I know, because we just landed on it. More precisely, the European Space Agency has placed a washing machine-sized landing craft named Philae on the surface of the comet.

I am not making this up. It was in the paper this morning. It’s all over the Internet.

This has never happened before. It has taken ten years and $1.75 billion for the Rosetta orbiter spacecraft to get close enough to launch the Philae lander onto the comet’s surface. And, it worked. Well, mission control is not sure how firmly attached Philae is to the ground, but she’s there. She’s arrived.

The ground is a 2.5-mile-wide ball of rock, ice and dust that looks like a cracked and beaten shooter from an ancient game of marbles in the sky, a leftover from when the solar system was young and forming, a shot that went wild, beyond the ring, and is now traveling at 41,000 miles per hour, searching for the other players. There may be something on that comet to help us understand how those first games went and how our planet came into its own, which is what Philae and Rosetta are hoping to measure and send back to the scientists at home.

You know, it’s really not that much colder there than here.

Data from Rosetta says the average surface temperature down on the comet, where Philae landed, is about -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit). That seems warm for outer space. I mean the coldest recorded day in Antarctica was -89.2 C (-128.56 F). So, the surface of the Earth has been colder than the comet. Yes, it is cold there. But, for a marble in space with no fast-food restaurants or people to keep warm, is it really that cold? And, that marble is headed for the sun, so it will get warmer.

Wait. . . .

That could be an issue for Philae, who could be damaged by the hotter temperatures.

I worry for little Philae. She cared enough for us to travel all that way to get a local weather report and retrieve some lost data from the first solar games. You know, I think “Philae” means “caring one.” Well, there, we need to think more about her and less about us. She needs to stay cold and safe from the sun.

Wait!

What am I saying? I’m freezing. I’m in favor of warm. I want more sun. What’s going on here? Why am I concerned about a small robot WALL-E lost in space? Why am I becoming agitated about an extraterrestrial ET who hasn’t really called home for ten years or more?

Why don’t I even notice the temperature outside right here, right now?

You know, I don’t. I don’t even feel the cold anymore.

That’s it, all I needed was a new adventure.

Something to distract my thoughts.

Someone to help me feel —

Warm, right here at

Home.

Grandpa Jim