Things I can't.

1) The Patriots. My gridiron team bombed out of the playoffs in the most... augh. It's more than a week later and I still feel like I died inside. I had to get whiskey drunk, y'all. (Actually, in a text from that night I described myself as 'whiskety drunk', which I think is probably more accurate.)


2) The weather. You lot might be besieged with floods and locusts and rains of blood or whatever, but it is fucking cold here. And that's not just my unacclimatised ass complaining: in the last 24 hours we have hit temperatures lower than Boston has seen in about a decade. Like, in the negative Fahrenheits. This morning the five-minute walk from the train to work reduced me to tears. I was wearing a big wool coat with a hood, a wool scarf, a warm sweater with a huge cowl neck, a thermal shirt, a singlet, heavy jeans, huge thick socks, sneakers, and gloves. But halfway there my legs were burning - burning - from the cold. When I went back out a few minutes later to walk another five minutes to the gym, I put my yoga pants on under my jeans; and while I took them off once I was settled back in my office, I will be putting them back on when I go home. One of the major local channels described today's weather on their website as 'ridiculous cold'. I swear I'm not making that up.


3) The weather, some more. We have also been getting record snowfalls. I've had one snow day a week at work for the last three weeks, and am likely to have at least one more this week thanks to the rain/snow/ice storm scheduled to hit us Tuesday-Thursday. (By which I mean all of those days. Not sometime between Tuesday and Thursday. All three days. Really.)

Now, I know that some of you will look at that and say it should be exciting and fun. And you know what? Yes, snow can be really pretty when it's fresh and you're watching from somewhere warm. But at the risk of shattering some illusions, let me tell you that that is not the whole picture.

Snow is messy. It gets everywhere and is hard to clear away completely to make safe paths for walking or driving. What's left behind turns to nasty wet slush that gets into your shoes and socks and pants, or more dangerously freezes and tries to kill you. The sand that the city and residents put down to melt the snow gets all over the snowbanks, which adds a texture effect to piles already discoloured by pollution and dogs. Snow is heavy to shovel and hard to to walk through, until it gets packed-down and becomes impossible to shovel and hard to walk over. And while getting snow days is exciting and fun when it happens, what are you meant to do when the Mayor and the Governor are telling people it's too dangerous to be on the roads, but your work is open anyway? Because that happened to me last week too, and you know what? It's a shit decision to have to make, and one that people here have to make far too often. I'm lucky that I work at a college and as
such am more likely to have classes (and therefore work) canceled, but most people don't have that luxury and it's fucking dangerous. And don't even get me started on the mess that happens when schools get the day off but their parents have to work.

It's not that nice. It's really, really not.

*****

Lest I sound overly grim, though, I will add that I've had a lovely 24 hours courtesy of A Certain Chef who took me out for fancy drinks and fancy food at fancy places last night. Still can't quite shake the feeling that something's missing, but I'm putting the time in to work it out. I'm well aware that what's missing might just end up being 'the crazy', and while I will say it's kind of boring without the crazy, it's also kind of nice. We'll see how sensible I end up being.