Archive for January 2011
Relative Cold
There is nothing like jumping from the warmth of a weekend in the Florida sun to the extreme bite of a Minnesota cold snap. It’s funny seeing the reactions of people who have never experienced bitter cold as they contemplate what it must be like.
I am always surprised how many things actually survive the extreme cold temperatures, even though a few things are pushed beyond their limits. If a car isn’t properly prepared, the cooling system can freeze up and, ironically, the engine can overheat. Tires can lose air when the seal of rubber against the metal rim develops a leak. Occasionally, the deep freeze can cause roads to heave and create pot holes that swallow whole tires. But for the most part, life does go on with nary a hitch. Traffic moves, people function. Schools, businesses, and stores continue to operate, regardless the hyper, overly desperate, sensationalized, fear raising meteorologist’s rantings.
Minus 10–20°F feels pretty intense when it slaps you in the face and rides the otherwise warm path through your nose down into your lungs. There is a reason it gets described as biting cold. Nature knows about cold like this. Buildings and machines of metropolises, even when designed for such extremes, just don’t appear to belong when the bottom drops out on the thermostat readings.
I’ve been through over 50 of these Minnesota winters, and I still marvel over the way life carries on, despite how cold it might get. It is hard to explain, but no matter how biting cold it is, it is possible to stand outside and have a sensation of being warm. (No, not that desperate point of hypothermia where people start taking their clothes off type of warm.) There is something about feeling your body continue to function when everything around you seems to have come to a complete, frozen halt. It’s a warm feeling.
But it only lasts for a brief moment, and then you actually sense that you are beginning to come to that same complete, frozen halt, and you have to get the hell back inside. Minnesota is not for sissies.
Don’t forget to wear a hat.
Let’s Pretend
I am back where the brisk breeze of winter is bringing extreme cold to the region and am hoping that our little jaunt to warmer climes has done little to alter my ‘thickened’ blood. Yes, I dearly love the wintertime and snowy wonderland, but that doesn’t mean I don’t also appreciate the feeling of having warm water sooth my entire being while sunshine bathes us all under a beautiful sky. It doesn’t hurt when the pleasant atmosphere is combined with freedom from the demands of a couple days worth of backlogged work, but I’m willing to overlook that complication. While I slog through the piles of work on my desk, I am going to pretend I am still on the patio in Florida. While the broadcast meteorologists are ranting and raving over how dangerously cold it might get, I am going to imagine the palms swaying in the breeze and the gulls exploring shells in the sand on the beach. I will visualize that I am eating my lunch beside the pool and a water fountain is spraying the pond in the distance. Watch out for alligators!
Relative Excess
We are home again, and the first thing I was faced with last night was the chore of cleaning up the pile at the end of the driveway left by the snowplow. I shoveled the driveway again! Home, sweet home.
Once again, we have been lucky enough to enjoy some of the pleasures of the extremely wealthy. Yesterday, we took a drive through a neighborhood of beyond-category luxury ocean-front homes on our way to a state park beach. Sunday we had a late lunch in Naples, where we watched cars worth more than our Minnesota home, cruise past the shops that offer $28,000 artwork for sale. People walking past me on the street were wearing clothes and jewelry that look like probably cost more than I earn in a year.
We may be among the small percentage of people in the world who own a home, and multiple automobiles, have money in the bank, and can afford airfare for leisure travel, but we have nowhere near the wealth that I am exposed to when I visit the Florida Gulf coast. And this is just one small place in the world where the wealthy gather. It boggles my mind that there can be enough incredibly wealthy people to account for the lavish offerings that exist there and elsewhere. Who are all the people that have enough money for the yachts, mansions, fancy cars, and other things I once believed were the realm of athletes, celebrities, corporate executives, sheiks, and drug lords?
Maybe in my mind, it is like this: anyone with less money than us, doesn’t have enough, and anyone with more, has too much. Unfortunately, the way it usually plays out for me is that, when I see others around me who don’t have as much as me, I feel like I have too much.
Given the obvious poverty of the majority of the people in the world, I know that I have more than I deserve.
We truly are very lucky to have enjoyed such luxury in our visit to the Florida home of Cyndie’s parents with our friends. We experienced 3 days of fabulous sunshine and warm temperatures in the middle of winter. On our last day, some rain moved in, but not until after we enjoyed one last wonderful walk on the beach. The sun popped out late in the day while we were waiting at the airport, producing a magnificent complete double rainbow that nicely marked the completion of our magical visit. It wasn’t all that difficult to have excessive fun amid all that amazing excess.
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I feel like I’m under-reporting with these text-light posts, but who has time to write when there are beaches to comb, pools to swim, Historic Sites to explore, and restaurants to be dined? Our winter mini-vacation 2011 has been everything we hoped it might be.
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Trudging Onward
Still no shoveling happening here for us! Let me share our current struggles with you, in image…
Hello Sunshine
It was cold and snowy yesterday when I woke up, and then, half a day later, a pilot was telling us that the temperature just reached 70° (F, obviously). We arrived to Fort Myers sunshine and enjoyed lunch outdoors at a bistro where they had heaters on for the locals, which gave us a chuckle. I did no shoveling whatsoever. Marie’s orchids look happy as can be. We grilled steaks out under the moon and stars on the lanai patio and enjoyed a fabulous meal together before catching a movie to round out our day. Felt an awful lot like being on vacation.
Bye For Now
It is with mixed emotions that I report my departure from our incredibly beautiful snow-filled landscape today, as Cyndie and I are traveling with our good friends, Mike and Barb, to visit the Florida home of Cyndie’s parents. It is a chore that must be done, and I do have it in me to address such difficult tasks while maintaining a sense of decorum. I will refrain from kicking and screaming as I am dragged onto the plane in my shorts and sandals, and I will take it like a gentleman. I will quietly read my paper, leaning back in the seat, while the pilot does all the work and everyone at my day-job continues the usual Friday grind without me.
Do not weep for me as I bask in the Florida sunshine, laughing with friends and eating well. Go ahead and let it snow back home, every day I am gone. I will NOT be shoveling snow this weekend. Hah! No snow shoveling. That’s a REALLY good thing because after just having done so last night again, I can’t imagine where I would put any more snow if I were here to do the shoveling. I’m hoping the piles will settle a little during my absence so that it won’t be too hard to manage the project which I’m sure will be waiting for me upon our return. If we return. I may choose to repeatedly volunteer to be bumped from the return flight we have booked.
I told the folks at work that I may have to take a return flight that has a layover… in Portugal!
Blessed Inhalation
I gotta tell ya, being able to inhale to my fullest, deepest desires is one pleasure that I think I will cherish like never before. Pain, mitigated!
During some of the worst of my aforementioned pleurisy, I found myself amazed at the frequent revelations of how my body goes about acting involuntarily and how often those gyrations of an odd, awkward swallow, a preclude to a burp, a hiccup, a sneeze, even a shiver, would start to trip the trigger of muscles and tissue in the hazard zone, and of how naturally the pain signal would intercede in all activity to cut it short. I am not nearly as much of a commander of this vehicle as I thought I was. I am merely a passenger that every once in a while grabs the controls and steers the ship to alter the course, for better or worse.
Even when I tried to fill my lungs past that initial threat of pain, trying to override the reflex to give up and exhale, there was an involuntary abort which kept me from getting the breath I craved. I am exceedingly grateful to now be beyond that level of infirmity. I played floorball with the guys last night and my legs ran out of gas before my lungs ran out of air!
Breath deep, everyone, and take a moment to fully appreciate it. Because you can!
Things and Experiences
The thing about things and experiences is that most fly by faster than words can capture when I’m ensconced in the confines of the day-job for 10 hours a day trying to fill in for others who are ill, delayed by snow-slowed traffic, or on a skiing vacation in the mountains, leaving me spinning in opposite directions most of the day in a vain attempt to accomplish more instead of less toward the goals that lie before us; goals which currently far exceed our ability to successfully meet, forcing me to work at such an insane pace that I miss even noticing what the weather is doing outside and providing a little surprise at the end of the very long day, a day that was sweetened by meeting a friend for a dinner out that ended up putting me even more in the dark about the surprise that was waiting all over my driveway, particularly at the end by the street where the city plow had so perfectly piled a particularly firm and dense mass that was difficult to see because for some strange reason that could very likely be related to sub-freezing temperatures, the two outside light fixtures on either side of the garage door have decided to occasionally refrain from functioning, which makes a nice complement for the one by the front door that has a daylight sensor that is supposed to keep the bulb from lighting during daytime hours, yet seems to require direct sunlight to successfully interpret when it is actually daytime and so it stays on pretty much all the time, even though I rarely get to notice because I am stuck in the confines of the day-job, not that I haven’t tried to do something about that sorry lack of visual opportunity to see what the weather is doing by enlisting the services of a contractor to replace the one unused overhead dock door with window glass, but said contractor is proving to be a master of inaction and the project that was conceived during the warm months of autumn is now expected to take place in the coldest month of the year during the only hours the contractor’s crew engages in such installation activity and which just so happens to be the very same hours when our crew is executing their primary responsibilities, none of which involve sitting in a room with a gaping hole the size a truck could drive through during the coldest month of the year.
Relative Something 