Livin' In A Winter Wonderland

     ...It's highly overrated.  -6°F this morning!  That's -78 Centrifugal, of course, and cold enough to freeze your socks clean off either way.  TV weatherkins are begging viewers to "wear several layers of loose clothing" and that's just to stay inside and lookit the various flavors of timesuck screens -- if you actually go outdoors in suboptimal clothing, you've got about ten minutes before frostbite begins to set in.  In another ten, the synovial fluid in your joints freeze and you're stuck in whatever pose you were in until someone comes along with a teakettle-ful of warm water and thaws you out.

     We did get a little sun the last couple of mornings, hooray!

     The snow is not too deep and remains fluffy wherever it has not been compressed or thawed.  But I'll tell you what, along about Thanksgiving, the squirrels around here were getting fatter and fatter, until some of them could barely manage the usual dramatic leaps and were just lumbering lumpishly along, clambering up the fence posts and pausing to catch their breath before waddling along the tops of the boards to the nearest tree, where they'd blink up at it a bit, trying to work out how it'd got so far away, then push off, drop out of sight, and reappear making their way up the trunk with painful effort.  Now I know what they were putting on all that fat for.  Haven't seen a one since the snow and cold started.