1. Do you know what mice like to do when it gets cold? Move into poor, unsuspecting couple's basement and eat them out of house and home. Okay, just a graham cracker box and a bag of pancake flour, but still. Mice bring disease, too.
2. There's nothing that is quite so romantic as your husband screaming and jumping away from you when you touch his face because your hands are too cold. Even footsie has been banished until Spring. My feet are too cold, even with socks.
3. Winter makes me look and feel fat. Thanks Christmas for putting on those few pounds that make my clothes uncomfortable. And then I have to layer clothes like I'm an onion and my husband tells me I look like a babushka. His compliments keep getting more and more creative.
4. Inversions make me really, really sick. The only thing that really helps is my handy-dandy inhaler, except I didn't realize I was accidentally using an old one that expired in 2010. I used it for three days before noticing the expiration date. I'm just going to blame that idiocy on the lack of oxygen to my brain.
5. Speaking of inversions and how sick I've been, my orchestra conductor has scheduled a performance of Rite of Spring next month. There's nothing like atonal music, harsh repeated rhythms, ritual sacrifice, and death to go with a headache.
6. All these things put me in a very negative mood. I realized this the other day when I was sitting in my Music History class and I had to restrain myself from turning around and chastising the guy behind me for being too enthusiastic. The story may be interesting but the constant "Ooh, that's so interesting," is just brown-nosing. Come on, it's too cold to be happy!
7. The cold has kept me from achieving my New Years Resolution of getting in shape. It is just too frigid to drive to the heated gym.
8. Ice on the inside of the windows of your apartment. I thought basements were supposed to be insulated.
9. Pulling a nice, fresh, clean pair of socks out of the dryer and they're even colder than your nearly frostbitten toes.
All this considering, maybe this was the wrong month to devour 850 pages of Tolstoy.
There are a few things good about the last month.
1. The third floor of the engineering building has a beautiful view when there has been freezing rain and people have a tendency to fall on their rears while walking to their classes. I don't even know why people pay for Netflix.
2. Brad's sweatshirt is incredibly comfortable. I wear it every time I get sick. I'm sure he loves that.
3. Hubert. Hubert is my space heater. We are very good friends and we get to spend so much time together this time of year.
4. Realizing that I do indeed have the best husband in the world. He scrapes the windshield, changes the air filter, makes me soup, holds my hand when I am coughing up a chest full of mucus (was that a gross enough image?), takes me ice skating, makes fun of me when I get too self-conscious about the way I look, buys me new nail polish just to make me feel pretty, does the dishes, brings me Hubert and a blanket every time I shiver, and laughs at all my jokes. Take that married girls! My man's the best one. I love being the best, or in this case, having the best.
5. My new blender Brad gave me for Christmas provides all the vitamin C I've been getting lately. I don't know if I really love smoothies or if I just love watching my insanely talented blender obliterate everything I chuck inside it. The brand is called Ninja for goodness' sakes. That fruit and ice never stood a chance.
6. I really do love winter sports. Even ice-skating, which is sissier than my other favorites, but still fun. But no one will ever know how much fun we have when we go because there is no one to take our picture and we're really bad at taking our own pictures. Case in point:
This is why people double-date.
