Cold as ice

Today was a weather milestone - we're getting into the season of weather milestones - because it was the first night when it went below freezing. It was still just on freezing when I woke up this morning, and so it became also a wardrobe milestone, the first day I wore the winter coat work work instead of the fall coat. The winter coat was my winter coat in Australia so it's just barely adequate at this temperature, but I'm going to hold out to wear the big knee-length down one with fur on the hood until it hits 20F degrees, the temperature for which it was rated in the Eddie Bauer catalog.

Today when I left work and walked outside I felt that feeling on my skin that I remember from last year, but with a completely different attitude toward it. The feeling of the air when it's in the low 40's, when you've lived in Australia for 15 years and San Diego for 4 before that, is an alarming feeling. There's kind of a metallic sting to it, and the feeling of it causes alarm. "Hurt!" your skin says to you. "Cold! Hurt! Warning! Wrong! Something wrong! Hey!" The recent arrival from Australia attends to these alarms from the surface of the skin and feels panic and concern and a kind of surreal feeling that you never thought you could be this cold and here you are out it in. But the long-term Wisconsinite just doesn't attend to the sensation at all. It was still there, I checked, but all my attention was on the toasty warm center of my body, where my core temperature was consistent and just fine. I knew nothing bad would happen, on that walk to my car, and that I wouldn't get so cold that I couldn't warm back up again in like one minute with the car heat on me, so I didn't attend to it as a sensation at all.

And that's freaky, seriously, don't you think? But I'm proud of it! I've paid my dues, through the longest, coldest and snowiest winter in the past 100 years, and now that another winter is nearly upon us, I'm ready, I know what's in store, and I'm not worried, inside I'm toasty warm.