Swings (Temperature and Mood)

I was out of town last week - hence, no new posts. I trust you all survived the devastation of not having fresh content from me.

I imagine you all looking just like this.

Full disclosure: I could have written new posts last week. Yes, indeed. I had my laptop with me, and jeebus knows I had time to write, even though I was technically on vacation. It's not as if my days were filled with fun activities that had me gamboling all over the place during the day and falling, happily exhausted, into my bed each night.

Here's the thing. I was staying at my parents' house last week. A house I left exactly twice during my visit. Once was to grab lunch in the McD's drive-thru. The second time was to meet the family at a restaurant to celebrate my Dad's birthday. We all had a nice dinner, did presents, chatted and reminisced, and then we bundled up against the cold and headed out into a full-on freaking snowstorm.

Mind you, just a couple of hours earlier, the handsome, smiling weatherman on TV had told us all that absolutely no snow would be falling that night. The handsome, smiling weatherman on TV flat-out lied. But maybe, technically, he didn't lie. Because very little snow was actually falling. It was instead being driven pretty much horizontally behind a gale-force wind directly into our faces.

It looked a lot like this. Really.

I was driving that night. I was driving a rental car, with my elderly parents in the back seat, on roads with which I'm only marginally familiar, in the kind of conditions that, here at home in Texas, would have literally shut down the city. 

It was an absolutely terrifying drive through a near-solid wall of white. I think my hands finally unfurled from their vise-like grip on the steering wheel two days later.

But that's not why I didn't leave the house again until it was time to go to the airport. The snow, as fierce as it was, was dry and powdery, and the whipping wind blew it all off the roads by the next morning. What kept me inside the rest of my stay was the temperature, which dropped like a manic Plinko ball in the wake of the snowstorm.

Do you want to know how many degrees it was outside?

One. It was one single, solitary, frigid degree.

Shown here: WTF degrees.

I'm not built for that. I'll admit it, I'm not proud. And while I'm amply equipped with protective body fat, it's not rated for one degree above zero. It's rated for "I think I can turn the heat down to 70, as long as I wear wool."

But I'll say one thing for the single-digit trauma I endured. It enabled me to experience a truly impressive temperature differential this morning when I returned to work.

Let me just say that my place of work has never, for a single hour, maintained an appropriate temperature. For most of the year it's abysmally cold. Even in the middle of August, when you'd think a hyperthyroidal air conditioning system would be a good thing, it manages to be so unpleasantly cold that you actually enjoy going out in the Texas heat for a few brief moments before sanity returns.

The one time of the year when it's warm at work is during the unpredictable months of autumn, when you may want a sweater in the morning and a bucket of ice to pour over your head in the afternoon. The HVAC in the building doesn't know what to do in these changeable circumstances, so it just sort of blows out the most random, least appropriate temperature it can manage, as if thinking to itself, "If you can't please everyone, you should please no one."

Also my personal mantra.

Anyway, when I got to work the door to my office was closed, probably to signal to the cleaning crew that the slob who normally occupies it had given them the week off. I opened the door and was greeted by the warm currents of a Santa Ana wind, localized inside my office. It was seriously balmy in there.

I checked the thermostat. Eighty-two degrees.

That is not a comfy indoor temperature at any time of year. Fortunately, by mid-morning the a/c had remembered itself and resumed being an asshole on the cold side of the spectrum.

But I had achieved something pretty remarkable: I had experienced an 81-degree temperature difference in the space of a couple of days. It was a new personal record, I'm guessing. I mean, it's not as if I track how often I'm subjected to utter nonsense like an 80+ degree swing, both extremes of which were exceedingly uncomfortable and annoying. But I think I would have remembered such a ridiculous occurrence, right?

For the record, 1 degree is not nearly as cold as it gets in Wisconsin during the winter, and I've experienced much colder temperatures. Just not two weeks before Christmas and combined with a blizzard that Handsome McForecaster promised wasn't going to happen. Also for the record, any desire I may have harbored to return to my hometown and live in the Midwest again froze to fucking death last week.