Wow! What a Winter!

Hiya, Winter.  Can we just be normal now?

Hiya, Friends!  Happy Friday to you!  How the heck are you?

I'm doin' great.  The weather's warmed up a lot since Mondee and Tuesdee, and that's great stuff in my book!  Our house was so cold that I could hear it pop and make all kindsa noise, and Mommy said it was just the materials contracting.  It was scary the first coupla times I heard it, but I know everything was okay.  Nothing froze all up, and that's remarkable, considering how cold it was!

All that's behind us now, though.  All that's behind us now.

You know what's really crazy to me?  After all that really-really cold weather, the weather we're having now, which would normally seem quite cold, feels merely "a little chilly."

We're just gettin' started.

I always say it's all just a matter of perception, and I guess once you've been stuck in the deepest-freeze section of the freezer, coming out into the regular-freeze section feels like a tropical vacation for a little while.  So there's something to be positive about, I think, Friends! 

The super-cold weather makes it so much easier to APPRECIATE the regular coldness we'd all be griping about this time of year, if we hadn't just experienced an Arctic Blast and a Polar Vortex this week.

It got me to thinking about Winter.  Friends, didja know that we're not even a whole entire month into Winter?  It's true.  Even though we dallied with Winter in November, and most of December was cold and we had some snow to make things look pretty, Real Winter didn't even start until right before Christmas.  And it goes until March!

That's why I'd like to have a talk with Winter and say that we know it's here, and we accept its right to be a season and we accept its right to be cold, because... well, that's Winter for ya, but now that it's asserted itself in such a bold way, what with the life-threatening double-digit below-zero temperatures and such, can't it just be normal?  No more of this extreme business.

It's hard to relax around somebody who's gotta be EXTREME all the time!

Well, no.  Think about it.  EXTREME! is fun for little periods of time.  It's fun to eat EXTREME! hot wings for a couple-three hot wings.  Maybe for one meal, but think about it.  If ya eat EXTREME! hot wings all the time, pretty soon, you're gonna burn a hole in your digestive system.

Yeah, it's true.  I read about it on the Internet.

Or, if you're on an EXTREME! shopping trip, where you've got a long list of things to buy in a short time, and it's all about speed and accuracy.  It's so much fun for the day, but if you kept up that EXTREME! pace for very long, you'd be tired out, cranky, your feet would hurt, and you wouldn't wanna see the inside of a store or shopping mall for a while. 

Then there's EXTREME! personalities.  This has been blamed on me and my People, the Toddlers, so many times.  That we aren't just happy.  We're HAPPY!  We aren't sad.  When we're upset, the world is literally ending.  We're SO SAD!!!  I will concede to the truth in this, based on my own personal experience.  Toddlers just feel and express things much more biggly than you Big People do, with the exception of adolescents.  Adolescents are a mess, even compared to my People.

Winter, man... be chill!  I love ya!  Muah!

The point of all that is that I recognize this in myself and other Toddlers, and I've drawn a parallel between our EXTREME! mood swings, and this Winter's EXTRME! behavior, and I just wanna say, "Winter, be chill.  Be cool.  Regular cool, not ARCTIC BLAST EXTREME SUPER-FROSTY POLAR VORTEXY COOL!  You don't hafta be all EXTREME! for us to notice ya, no matter what ABC's weather department has embroidered on their jackets."

We're just gettin' started with Winter here in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.  If we're gonna live here, we might as well make friends with Winter 2014.  We might just as well.  We'll all feel better for the next few months, instead of bein' mad about the weather that's gonna stick around, no matter how we feel about it. 

Awww, Friends.  Smile.  Put on a cute knitted hat or a hoodie, grab yourself a cuppa hot cocoa with lotsa marshmallows, and smile.  I'm right here with ya.  I love ya lots, no matter what the weather's doing.  You could say I love ya to the EXTREME!  RAAAAAAWR!  Hahahahahaha! 

And I'll see ya, right back here, tomorrow!  Muah!