"Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart" or a post with a theme!

What a ridiculously warm day. Well, maybe not quite that ridiculous, but 30 is a far cry from -50 or whatever we were facing last week. It's a damn heatwave.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It's just that, with weather like this, you can almost fool yourself into believing that spring might eventually come some day because it feels like it's around the corner right now. But it's not. This is all a big trick by Father Winter. He's just taunting us. I know it. He's pointing his finger and laughing, and I am just cringing, waiting for the blow, waiting for the moment when the temperature drops back down below zero again... that punishing cold that makes your nose hair freeze to the inside of your nasal cavity and your lungs seize up every time you take a deep breath. You know what I'm talking about, Minnesotans. The deep freeze. It's like Bill Murray says in Groundhog Day, "I'll give you a winter prediction: It's gonna be cold, it's gonna be grey, and it's gonna last you for the rest of your life." (Speaking of Groundhog Day, does anyone know if the chubby rodent from Pennsylvania saw his shadow? Not like it really matters, but just curious.)

For the first time in my life, I actually really want winter to end, or, I want to go away, someplace far far away and far warmer. Someplace where I can go outside and not have a scarf wrapped around my head and a hat on and still feel like my face is cracking into little bits, someplace where I do not come back inside and have the bottoms of my pants soaked with salt and slushy water.

But I digress. Mostly I was just trying to enjoy an actually decent day which is promising to turn into a somewhat warm week! This gives me hope. Plus, winter really isn't all that awful; it just gets a bad rap sometimes. As Bill Murray said, also from Groundhog Day (hehe), "When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life. But standing here among the people of Punxsutawney [Duluth] and basking in the warmth of their hearths and hearts, I couldn't imagine a better fate than a long and lustrous winter." Let's hope the rest of this winter is just that. And, after all, it's only another step in the cycle.