January 14, 2009

Here in Wisconsin, the night before last, a sleepwalker died in the cold.

"Timothy Brueggeman was found about 190 yards from his house.... Deputies followed tracks of his bare feet in the snow to find him."

The temperature was -16°. (We don't speak in wind chill here. That was the temperature.)

Sleepwalkers, lock yourself in well.

11 comments:

knox said...

Well, shoot, I thought people in WI toodled around in shorts and flip-flops all the time in winter.

A friend of mine's father-in-law is paralyzed from the neck down. He sleepwalked right out of an upstairs window.

traditionalguy said...

That is really sad. Did he know he sleep walked or was this a newly acquired quirk? Anyway, add this to the reasons Global Warming is more to be desired than to be feared.

reader_iam said...

Wow. Double depressing.

AllenS said...

What were the options for this unfortunate man? Locking himself in the house? Putting on your snowmobile suit before going to bed? He was 51 years old. How did he survive for so long? Something isn't right here.

chickelit said...

I was prone to that as a kid. The last time I did it was in Germany after a night of heavy drinking. Folks called me a Schlafwandler.

John Burgess said...

Some medications can have a side-effect of causing sleepwalking.

Currently, Ambien is the favorite of ambulance chasing lawyers. You sometimes see their ads on the low-price channels as they scrounge for people who sleepwalk and take the drug.

knox said...

John Burgess,

I've heard Ambien causes sleepeating.

Anonymous said...

Now I'm starting to wonder just how much of this magnum opus is sleepblogging.

J. Cricket said...

We don't speak in wind chill here

Which explains why yesterday's [Madison] Capital Times story about the weather includes this: "Wind chills could get to 40 below by Thursday night," said Weather Central Meteorologist Dan Thompson.

And why today's [Madison!] Capital Times story about the weather includes this: Actual temperatures are expected to drop to 20 below zero Wednesday night and Thursday night with wind chills down to 45 below zero, prompting the National Weather Service to issue a wind chill warning in effect from 6 p.m. Wednesday to noon Friday.

The warning was issued because the combination of very cold air temperatures and wind will create dangerously low wind chill values of 35 below zero or colder for three hours or longer.



Gawd Althouse, do you exaggerate EVERYTHING?

amba said...

The guy was on Ambien, and sometimes had a few beers with it.

Weirdly, the link no longer leads to that story. It leads to another cold-weather story, but the comments are still about the sleepwalker article.

Anonymous said...

wow,

i stayed up most of the night nursing the outdoor pipes. You think my landlord would have built in a shutoff valve when they redid the system. They didn't. they didn't even insulate them in this ol house , this ol uninsulated house. If they break they have already told me it's on my dime for negligence. So i put on the furnace full blast, had rat dander blowing at me with plus millions of mold spores. Then i had to get out of the house cause i can't stand the smell.

sometimes you ain't got no options when you are unfortunate. Thank goodness it's only like 5 below here and the library is warm and doesn't smell as bad as my place.

I love a climate with four seasons like the midwest offers. But this may be the final straw to make me move to someplace warmer.