Ugh. 

Cold.

Damp.

Dark.

It has been altogether dreary here for the last week.  And only slated to get drearier.

I have always had a hard time waking up in the cold.  I know that somewhere in my distant ancestors there was a subspecies of humans that hibernated through the winter months.  Cold, dark movie theaters are a guarantee that I will not get the value of my ticket price out of a movie.  I can fall asleep shortly after the popcorn runs out, even during the most action-packed films, if they turn the A/C down to frigid.

I am already primed to only reluctantly venture past the haven of my quilts in the winter mornings, but lately this has been compounded by the fact that Harry is waking with cold feet early in the morning hours and wanting a berth in Mommy and Daddy’s bed.  Considering that I am stingy about forking money over to the utilities, I have to accept a certain level of responsibility for his discomfort, but only to a point.  I will accept the claim that even footed blanket sleepers aren’t doing the trick against my miserly thermostat setting, but the boy can NOT keep his covers over himself.  To alleviate my portion of the blame, Harry has a reserved spot between Kris and I in the big King bed.  With a Jack Russell Terrier curled up behind my knees, radiating soft doggie heat, and a warm, sweetly sleeping toddler huddled against my stomach, is it any wonder that I have been consistently 15 minutes late to work all week?  What human being could possibly want to put their toasty toes on the cold tile floor of the still-dark kitchen when there is such blissful slumbering still going on?

Tragically, the primal urge to shut myself in a cave until spring with a handy supply of cheeseburgers and Diet Coke is extending to work.  I have reviewed the same reports five times in a row, and I still can’t remember what I read.  I am justifying a mid-day trip to Target as a job-related excursion, because unless I can get up and move, I risk falling asleep with my feet against the space heater and my drooling head on my keyboard.  If you suddenly see an unbroken string of random characters appear on this blog, don’t wonder.

It still amazes me that I am a child of the frozen North.  I grew up in a part of the country where it can reliably snow for the better part of six months.  That statistic still stuns me.  Thanks to global warming, my nieces don’t get to have the joy of spending the bulk of their school days pulling on a recalcitrant snowsuit every morning to walk to the bus stop, but the fact remains that Upstate New York is not a place for wimps.  Anectodal wisdom claimed that suicides in my hometown spiked in March – when people simply could not face the thought of one more month of snow.  We buried my Grandmother on Easter, and still had studded tires on the car.  How a loving God could justify dropping somebody so incredibly unsuited for dealing with winter into the heart of the US snow belt tests the concept of divine wisdom.

The even greater irony is that heritage should have prepared me for this.  I am born of Viking stock.  Red Haired, blue eyed and beached-whale-pale, even after 20 years of living in the Great Plains and the South.  The sun does not kiss me.  It slaps me stupid.  My people were forged from years on frozen seas, and herding shaggy sheep in the likes of Iceland and the Scottish Islands.  My people were decidedly Not Wimps.  You would think that people of my biological tendencies would have been weeded out a thousand years ago.

“Robbin Nilsdottir – get up and tend those sheep!”

“Unh…(snore)”

“Whack!  No mutton, haggis, or lutefisk for you, lazy girl!”

On the other hand, maybe that’s EXACTLY why us cold-haters survived.