11:10 p.m. - 07 March 2003
W is for Winter
W is for Winter
I am so ready for winter to be over it’s not even funny. It’s been the most schizophrenic season I can ever remember. The temperature has bounced between 30 and 60 degrees – sometimes in the same day. We’ve gotten snow. We’ve gotten ice. And most of all, we’ve gotten rain. The ground hasn’t dried out properly for weeks now and it’s about to drive me nuts.
It’s the time of year when I really want to get out in the yard and start doing some planning for the garden, but the soil is too damn wet to even consider tilling. The heel of my shoe sank in nearly two inches yesterday with absolutely no resistance. Most of the yard feels like a sponge when you walk across it.
And let’s not even talk about the wind. The worst thing about work (well, one of the worst things, anyway) is walking across the parking lot – there’s a wicked cross-breeze that just cuts right to the bone. Add in the very fine rain we’ve been having the last couple of days and you have yourself a couple minutes of absolute misery.
Of course, it’s been an unusually expensive winter, too; our bills for propane have regularly been over $250. We ran out completely a couple of weeks ago – on one of the coldest nights all winter, naturally. We went out to eat, came straight home and got right into bed. That was the night I discovered that the Ethernet cable for the laptop really will reach from my desk to the bedroom. Thank goodness our water heater is electric, or we probably would have had to stay in a hotel. It was a pretty miserable night even with hot water.
Winter hasn’t always engendered this much hostility from me – I usually enjoy it. I love being snuggled under a blanket when I watch TV, but it’s too damn hot for that from April until about mid-October. I love cocoa; I love soup; I love all of those hearty foods that you seem to crave every winter. I still do, actually, I’m just sick and damn tired of them. Old Man Winter can go fuck himself, as far as I’m concerned. This is North Carolina -- Coastal North Carolina. It’s not supposed to be like this. Can we just skip to May now?
This has been an entry for AlphaBytes. I'm working my way through the alphabet backwards just because I can.
