Well, if stepping in cat barf is the worst thing that happens, I won't complain. It could be worse. My friends in Minnesota are slammed with excruciatingly cold temperatures, just inhumanly cold arctic air, snow, ice, and wind. It's nuts. I'm such a weather wimp, I can hardly handle 40°. Although I've heard people from back East tell me that Portland has a special brand of damp winter cold that gets in the bones and stays for days, often in the form of pneumonia.
We all have our ways of coping. Me, I just microwave my rice-filled foot warmer and hunker down to wait it out. If you wait long enough, even a crappy fog inversion layer will eventually dissipate to reveal blue sky. Today we had sunshine, real honest-to-goodness sunshine, but the arc of the sun is so low in the sky, we might as well be in Alaska. It's barely 3:30 in the afternoon and already it's twilight in the north shadow of Mt. Tabor. There's no point in trying to go for a walk. Even if I find some dregs of sunshine on the west side of the hill, the shady sidewalks and roads will be treacherous. Because a hip fracture took down my dad, I am understandably wary of pavement covered with frost, ice, moss, or even just deceptively dangerous plain old rain.
I've decided that one of my resolutions for the new year is to stop calling other drivers terms of endearment like Jacka-- and F---head. I say these names with very little animosity, more like a greeting, really. Like, Hey, what's going on, Jacka--? Still, if anyone heard me (and sometimes my mother does), one might think I was angry (sometimes I get frustrated, but it's always short-lived; the adrenalin is not worth the effort). So, in an effort to do my part to make the world a slightly better place, I hereby resolve to use the kinder terms Jackrabbit and Furhead when I am greeting drivers who are attracting my attention with their odd, quirky, charming, stupefying, and otherwise incomprehensible behavior. And Gramps always works, too.
