Adventures in the Stroudmobile, deep freeze edition

I know it has been a while since my last post, but as it turns out the holidays (even in Barrow, AK) are hectic and at the same time not much worth reporting happened.  Until today.  We had a dinner date set with some new friends and we had been looking forward to it... as it turned out, the date for our dinner this evening was one of the coldest days we've experienced yet.  As I type the temperature outside is -35 degrees F with a wind chill of -53.  In other words, if you are outside and are dressed inappropriately you risk frostbite on exposed skin in about 10 minutes.  Usually on a day like this, we huddle down in our warm house.  But as I said, we were looking forward to this!  So we started the van 30 minutes early as needed to go anywhere and Ian went out to scrape.  One of the idiosyncrasies of our lovely van is that it often frosts the inside of the windshield as well as the outside.  Double the scraping!  But at temperatures like these, our breath frosted up the inside almost as fast as we could scrape and the defrost fan has also apparently started working only intermittently.  There wasn't much else to do but drive quasi blind.  Ian was a master at scraping while steering and I had to hang my head out the side window to supplement Ian's impaired vision with an audible description of what I could see from my vantage point.  Teamwork in Barrow is important!  We got to our destination in one piece, if a little windblown and chilled on my part.  Dinner was wonderful and we have new friends to prove for our driving adventure.  At least things weren't quite as bad visually on the way home so I didn't have to hang my head out like a dog on the way back... but it was still far, far from ideal.  Needless to say, I think we're going to have to figure out a solution to our inside frost problem.  Not having the defrost fan is not ok!  I guess we're sufficiently acclimated now because -35 doesn't really phase us.  We're used to the obscene amount of clothes and the instantaneous nose-hair freeze upon walking outdoors.  It's crisp.  I like it.