G'bye to you too, January.
So my calves and ankles totally hate me, and will no doubt hate me worse tomorrow morning. And so does the weather.
See, I started walking to work again yesterday after a few months of being lazy. Which was enough just to start with. It was nice and warm yesterday, too--at least, relatively speaking--and I thought hey, at least I picked a good day to start up again, this is a sign.
Turns out it wasn't so much a sign as a setup. Because all that warmth? Started melting the snow and wetting down the pavement. Then, when the bottom dropped out of the thermometer last night, it all froze. The streets, and more personally notably the sidewalks, were doing their very best impressions of skating rinks this morning. And I gotta tell you it's fun walking ~eight blocks on solid, uneven ice, quite often canted toward the street in which pass cars that still are not making much of an effort to watch for pedestrians.
The streets had been cleared by the time I got off work at noon. The sidewalks? Not so much.
(Also, the bottom of the thermometer has not, at last report, been replaced. It was colder at 3:30 this afternoon than it was at 7:30 this morning, and kindly do not talk to me about windchill on a day when I thought "eh, it's not that bad, I don't need my gloves.")
That said, I still can't really see living one of those freakish places where there aren't proper seasons and it's triple digits in the summer. I like winter, by and large, when I've remembered to prepare for it. And it's way too fun to freak out my warm-climate friends with my winter camping stories. :)
See, I started walking to work again yesterday after a few months of being lazy. Which was enough just to start with. It was nice and warm yesterday, too--at least, relatively speaking--and I thought hey, at least I picked a good day to start up again, this is a sign.
Turns out it wasn't so much a sign as a setup. Because all that warmth? Started melting the snow and wetting down the pavement. Then, when the bottom dropped out of the thermometer last night, it all froze. The streets, and more personally notably the sidewalks, were doing their very best impressions of skating rinks this morning. And I gotta tell you it's fun walking ~eight blocks on solid, uneven ice, quite often canted toward the street in which pass cars that still are not making much of an effort to watch for pedestrians.
The streets had been cleared by the time I got off work at noon. The sidewalks? Not so much.
(Also, the bottom of the thermometer has not, at last report, been replaced. It was colder at 3:30 this afternoon than it was at 7:30 this morning, and kindly do not talk to me about windchill on a day when I thought "eh, it's not that bad, I don't need my gloves.")
That said, I still can't really see living one of those freakish places where there aren't proper seasons and it's triple digits in the summer. I like winter, by and large, when I've remembered to prepare for it. And it's way too fun to freak out my warm-climate friends with my winter camping stories. :)