Chillin'

    I've heard it said that you should never wish away a single day of your life.
    And yet I always find myself wishing away two whole months of every year of my life: January and February.  I invariably wish those months would go away and drop me off in March.  Preferable the middle of March. 
    Truly, there's nothing I like about January and February in the Midwest.  It's not that there's nothing to like about our winters: 
      Lovely snowscapes,

      Cozy fires,

​...of course, in order to have your fire you have you have to go outside and gather the wood,

​...then you have to get the darn thing going,

​...something that, girl scout that I was, I still have no gift for.

    My point , though, is that even though there may be some nice aspects of winter, for me the freezing weather cancels  them all out.  I just can't stand the cold.  At all.
    All winter long I feel like this:

    Cold from my fingertips to my toes, skin parchment-dry, fingertips cracked and bleeding, hair lying down and playing dead. 
    Bundling up does nothing for my frozen extremities - layers of clothes over under armour sometimes leaves me sweating in the mid-section and cold on the nose, hands, and toes. 
    Other times bundling up seems to have the same effect on me as  wrapping a cold drink in one of those insulated drink wraps - it just keeps the cold inside.  Kind of like in the movie "Frozen" when the heroine Anna is struck in the heart with a magic freeze ray and starts freezing to death from the inside out.  I didn't really care for "Frozen".  Just watching it made me feel cold.
     Though it seems to bother me more the older I get, the cold always bothered me anyway.
    When I was growing up my mother the nurse always believed that a cool home was healthier than a warm one, not to mention the expense of heating our big, old, Victorian-era house with its vintage fuel-oil furnace:

      And so I grew up cold but, alas, not especially healthy.  Over every childhood winter as far back as I can remember I was, like some pale waif out of "Les Miserables",  cold and sick and coughing from a chronic galloping upper respiratory infection that caused me to miss so much school it's a wonder I learned to read and add.   One of the editors of my high school year book jokingly suggested that among my list of school activities should be written:  "Likes to cough".
     Then I went off to college and got the bed next to the radiator in a warm dorm room and like magic I stopped being sick all winter.
     Since then I've been a fairly healthy specimen, even though the temperature of the home I currently inhabit is  kept at a brisk 67-68 degrees all winter because a couple of years ago Tom and I, in a spirit of environmental responsibility (and when it happened to be in the middle of summer), agreed to a plan with the gas company to have a special doodad thermostat installed in our house that is supposed to keep the temperature at constant 68 degrees all winter except that in actuality the heat doesn't kick on until the temperature slips down to 67 degrees and only then is the temperature brought back up to the agreed-upon 68 degrees.   A couple of times I've tried sneaking the temperature up to a civilized 72 degrees but the special doodad thermostat won't let me.
     So I'm still cold.  And still wishing it were the middle of March.