Wisconsin weekend
Ah, April in Wisconsin, where every weekday is sunny and warm, and every weekend is rainy and cold.
Makes me kind of miss February a little bit. It sucked, but it never teased you with false promises of warm weather.
weather
heaped
It’s springtime in Wisconsin, and I’m not the first one to say it’s a season fraught with disappointment, nor the first one to say, “Fuck this, I’m moving to New Mexico.” In fact, I’d bet I don’t have anything to say about spring in Wisconsin that hasn’t been said a million times already, but I can’t help observing for the million-and-first time that it sucks.
a dash of snow
distribution
I’m grateful that legal holidays are mostly on Mondays and Fridays to give us long weekends. Now can we work on the way they’re distributed across the calendar? We’ve got a holiday at the end of September, another at the end of December, one at the beginning of January and another two weeks later in the middle of January, AND THEN NOTHING UNTIL THE END OF MAY! I feel we really need a long holiday in February to help us through the winter. I wouldn’t say no to another long weekend in the middle of April, either.
morning walk
It was twenty-one degrees when I went on a walk this morning through the arboretum and I could feel every single degree through the forty-two layers of heavy clothing I was wearing. I kept up a brisk pace along the whole length of the walk over uneven ground and I never once felt like I was warming up at all. One of those days.
That said, I love my oboze shoes, which have kept my feet from freezing in every kind of weather. They’re waterproof and they must have some kind of magical insulation because my feet never get cold in them. This morning they were not what I could call toasty warm no matter how I stretched the definition, but they were never cold. My hands were colder than my feet in spite of the thick double-layer mittens I had pulled over my woolen gloves.
tuckered out
Went for a very long walk around the neighborhood today because temps were in the 40s for the first time in about two weeks, if I recall correctly, and I was feeling so good about getting out of the house until I got all tuckered out while I was still about a mile from our little red house so I had to trudge home, huffing and puffing all the way. It’s what happens when you don’t go outside for two weeks because you don’t like the cold but you also don’t have a treadmill in the basement. You can’t buy stamina at the store.
relativity
I went for a short walk around the neighborhood today, the first time I’ve been outside for a walk since before the Arctic blast came to town. The temperature outside finally got up to nineteen degrees Fahrenheit, not exactly balmy unless you were born on Pluto. I wasn’t, but I still went out without my parka and I have to admit I regretted leaving it behind before I’d gone a block down the road. I couldn’t stomach going back after so recently escaping the house, though, so I soldiered on and, by the time I’d walked about three blocks, I’d made the decision to make this a much shorter walk than I’d originally planned. Even so, I walked about ten blocks in about twenty minutes. Froze my ass off but I was glad to finally get out of the house.
icy cold
I took a walk in the evening after finishing up work, which is worth mentioning only because the temperature was oh-hell-no degrees below freezing but I needed to get out of the house. Besides, I still have the parka the Air Force issued to me when I was stationed at Misawa, at the northern tip of the Japanese main island, not that the winters in Misawa are cold enough that anyone would need a parka designed to keep them warm during an arctic winter, but I was grateful for it nonetheless. After I dressed up in layer after layer of clothing, I zipped my parka all the way up so you would not have been able to see my face unless I looked directly at you, and even then all that would have been visible would be my nose and eyes. It’s one of those parkas with a hood like a snorkel with a white furry fringe around the opening. The furry fringe keeps the wind out and the snorkel traps a warm cushion of air against your face, which would be great unless, like me, you wear glasses. The snorkel doesn’t keep the air warm enough to keep my glasses from cooling off and thus fogging over. I had to fiddle with the zipper a bit until I got just enough ventilation to blow away my breath but not so much ventilation that it defeated the purpose of the furry snorkel. Hard enough to see out of that hood without foggy glasses.
clearing
We got enough snow this morning that I had to shovel the driveway and, in spite of being out of shape and just shy of my 62nd birthday I was able to clear away every bit of the heavy, wet snow, even the stuff that the snow plow shoved into the end of the driveway, without giving myself a heart attack, so I’ll just be kicking back on the sofa feeling smug about myself for the rest of the evening, thank you very much.
first snow 11-15-2022
We’ve had a little snow fall before. Some of it even stuck for a little while, but this is the first time I’ve woke up to snow falling and still on the ground, so I guess this is it: The official start of winter. Woo-hoo.
This Is Drivel 