I turned on the heat in my apartment today. Why? Because I’m sitting here in lots of fleece, hoping that the outside temperature will go UP to FIFTY DEGREES before it’s time to go to school.
Where’s that global warming when you need it?
When I woke up this morning, the combined effect of an overcast sky and the sun’s just barely having risen combined to make it dark enough in my apartment that I had to turn a light on to avoid tripping over my dog. I know that many of you who have real jobs and things have to get up in the dark every day, but I still find it totally depressing.
Winter? DO NOT WANT.
It’s here, huzzah!
My definition of sweater weather is different from most people’s, I suspect. The temperature has dropped out of the 90’s since Ike, so last week at Target I felt compelled to buy two new sweaters in preparation. Yesterday the high was 88, and I wore my first sweater of the season. Today it got up to 90—sweater with a skirt!
The thing is, you see, that even though a sweater might not be ideal at 90 degrees, most of the day it’s not that hot. In the mornings and evenings it gets down into the low 70’s, which I find pretty uncomfortable without long sleeves or pants or both. I HATE being cold, even a little bit. It’s an awful, miserable feeling. There would have to be some SERIOUSLY ENTICING extenuating circumstances to get me to live someplace that has real winters. We’re talking daily massages, cookies that don’t make me fat, and Tim Gunn as my personal shopper.
Wednesday night’s lunar eclipse, that is. Wednesday was all thunderstormy here in Houston, and that evening the sky was still thickly overcast. I couldn’t even tell where the moon was supposed to be. Le sigh.
I haven’t seen a lunar eclipse that I can remember, but I did get to see a partial solar eclipse in elementary school. The teachers handed out dark paper glasses, but there weren’t enough, and I didn’t have anyone to share with. Instead I looked at the crescents on the ground where the sunlight shone through the trees. Still pretty nifty.
Ah, sweet humidity. You don’t know how much you miss it until it’s gone, gone, gone, leaving you with nosebleeds, chapped lips, flat hair, and painfully congested sinuses. The last four nights of the trip John and I slept in a room without a humidifier, and my congestion got worse and worse. The very last night I started a pot of water boiling and set it next to the bed, in the hopes that my stuffy head would clear up enough to let me get some sleep.
I saw many women in Colorado with normal-looking hair, and I wish I knew their secret. From the day we arrived, my hair stuck to my head in flat, limp sheets. I could’ve sworn half of it had plum fallen out, it was so thin. I washed it, I really did! But to no avail. The night we got home it plumped back up to its normal thin-side-of-average texture with no effort on my part. TV tries to tell me that humidity is hair’s archnemesis, but mine seems to thrive in it.
Yesterday the snow came down solidly all day, but we still went up for a half-day of skiing to take advantage of the relatively balmy (i.e., positive) temperatures. Although visibility was low, I managed to stay comfortably warm by wearing every article of ski clothing I own. My fingers were still cold, but when I took my gloves off for lunch my nails were slightly less purple than they’d been the day before, so that was nice.
Today EVERYBODY is taking the day off, except for a few hardy souls we saw trudging up to the mountain. A cold front blew through last night along with four inches of snow, and now the temperature is minus one degree (again, Fahrenheit) in the village. On top of the mountain it’s minus five, with a wind chill of minus thirty-one. MINUS THIRTY-ONE.
So we’re here, and it’s cold. The plane did not go down in a ball of flames, fortunately. In fact, the flight was rather pleasant. My personal experience of the flight was still horrible, of course, but not because of anything outside my little head.
Here in Keystone it is very, very cold. Not only is the temperature below freezing, it’s not supposed to even approach freezing until approximately March. How people live in climates like this for more than a week at a time is beyond me.
. . . which is why you get a crap post like this one. Why is my head fuzzy?! This upsets me.
I need to go to bed soon, or else I’ll get into a cycle where I feel crummy, so I’m afraid to go to sleep, so I stay up, but then I end up feeling worse, and the tiredness makes the crazy stronger, so then I’m REALLY afraid to sleep, and this goes on and on until I get so tired that I fall asleep in spite of myself, usually at some obscenely late hour with the lights on and a book on my face.
The weather’s supposed to turn wintry tomorrow after what’s been a pleasant Fall in the low 80s. I wore a short skirt today to say farewell to decent temperatures. Once it drops into the 60s, I’m not a outdoors fan any more.
Monday
Sunny. Highs in the mid 70s. North winds 10 to 15 mph.Tuesday
Sunny. Highs in the mid 70s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph.Wednesday
Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 70s.Thursday
Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 70s.Friday through Sunday
Partly cloudy. Highs in the mid 70s.
[via Weather Underground]
Fall has finally arrived in Houston, and it is glorious.
Okay, so I don’t have a TV, and in general I find local news sensational and useless. In the morning I check the national news, read some blogs, and go about my business. If it’s raining outside when I leave the house, I bring an umbrella. If it starts raining later in the day, I suck it up and get wet.
Imagine my surprise, then, when half an hour ago I stopped at the library to check my email, only to find a brand-new message from the administration that due to the incoming Tropical Storm Humberto, the university will close at 5:00 and won’t reopen until noon tomorrow at the earliest. A couple minutes later my boss called to discuss the possibility of cancelling my LSAT class tonight. (The jury’s still out on that one, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.)
Humberto? Never heard of him. So I head to wunderground, pull up the radar, and boom:
