A few thoughts on why winter is a pain in the ass.

Too Many Clothes: The weather has been sufficiently cold this past week or so that I have to wear a big, fat down-filled parka. It keeps me warm, but I hate having to wear the thing. I really hate having to drive in it. It is confining and renders your pants pockets inaccessible. The sad fact is that it is only necessary to keep from freezing until the car warms up and then to walk from the car to work. Shopping is a bitch too, because you need the coat to get to the store, but you really don’t need it once inside the store. I usually wind up sweating my stindeens off in the produce aisle. I long for tee shirt and shorts weather.

Gloves: This is sort of a subset of “Too many clothes.” If you’re outside for any length of time, you really need them, but I hate wearing the damned things. The problem is that if you need to do anything that requires more dexterity than wielding a snow shovel, you have to take them off anyway. As for driving, I simply cannot drive with gloves on. Any gloves thin and supple enough to permit comfortably driving in them (until the car warms up) won’t keep your hands warm anyway, so why bother. Then, there’s the problem of carrying the damned things around. They fill your pockets, and invariably one of them gets lost. Gloves are a pain in the ass.

Walking: Walking in the winter is a pain in the ass, because you have to keep your eyes fixed on the stretch of sidewalk five or six feet in front of you in order to be able to spot icy patches. Failure to do this could result in your doing a face-plant on the sidewalk.

Baby Steps: Once you see a patch of ice ahead and there’s no way to avoid it, you have to resort to taking little baby steps to keep your center of gravity over your feet. This is a particular treat when the slush freezes solid and the ice takes the form of a solid version of a rough sea. One wrong step could land you in the emergency room. Taking baby steps also makes you look like the farookin’ “Walnetto Guy” on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (for you folks old enough to remember “Laugh-In”). Baby steps are a pain in the ass.

Cruddy Looking Cars: My big, beautiful, fat, black, capitalist car is currently not black, but rather “road salt white.” It looks like hell. I hate it, but it makes no sense getting it washed, because it will look like shit again within twenty-four hours. Pain in the ass.

Potholes: These appear by the thousands at this time of year, and they are always a bone-jarring surprise. Some of them are big enough to damn near swallow your wheel and thereby cost you a tire, or a wheel, or worse, not to mention make you spill your coffee. Yet another pain in the ass.

Cabin Fever: Horseshit weather keeps folks at home. Last weekend, for example, other than spending “quality time” with Mr. Snow blower, I was in the house from Friday after work until Monday morning. Hell, we didn’t even open the Post Bar on Sunday. Right about now, I could use a warm breeze, a drink, and a good book outside on the deck. Dream on, Jimbo.

And finally, a word to the folks from the South (where I would prefer to be at this moment) who sometimes drive up North in the winter (God knows why): See that white stuff on the road? That’s snow, and it’s slippery. See the grayish stuff on the street? That’s ice, and it’s seriously slippery. Driving really, really fast on that stuff is a bad idea and slamming on your brakes while on it is a worse idea, and it will provide you with an instant physics lesson on the subject of inertia. Oh, and your four-wheel drive is useless as shit on ice. When the roads are snow and ice-covered and I see a car bearing Florida plates, I break my ass to get as far away as possible. I hate the sound of crunching metal and breaking glass. That’s a real pain in the ass.

Update: How could I have forgotten THIS?

Thanks to Karen for the pic.