It snowed yesterday (here’s my usual reminder that I write these a week ahead of time, so really it was eight days before this posted). It was fairly brief and I only got a bare glimpse of it because I was busy at work. I couldn’t stop to go watch the mixed snow and sleet come down, which was unfortunate, but I did get to see a bunch of people walk down a hallway I can see from my desk and a lot of them were dusted with the stuff. It’s not really the same thing at all, but it was enough for me to know it was snowing and when it eventually stopped. It was a weird occurrence, given that there hadn’t even been rain on the forecast when I went in to work that morning, and weirder still when you consider that we had a 24-hour period that hit the mid-sixties at the lowest just two days prior. Sure, it was above freezing so the snow didn’t stick around upon landing on the ground, but it was still weird to get our first snow in mid October. I mean, just recently I was thinking about how weird it’d be if we got our first snow before Halloween again and here we are, more than half a month beforehand. Now we’ve got a span of days sitting around freezing before we pop back into the sixties and maybe even seventies in about a week. Absolutely normal weather, for sure.

It’s difficult to plan my clothes for any given week when some days are sunny and fifty, meaning I would die wearing pants, and other days our cloudy, windy, and fifty, which means my calves would get so cold in shorts that it would make it difficult to walk with my normal gait and speed. Most of the time, it’s impossible to tell which day it’s going to be when I’m getting dressed in the morning. The weather could be anything around noon when I go on my walk three or four hours later. How am I supposed to trust any of the weather forecasting applications and services I have available to me when they’re all wrong so constantly? It’s getting to the point where I’m considering bringing a pair of pants or shorts, whichever I don’t wear, with me to work just so I can change if the need arises. After all, my goal is to be as comfortable as possible for my work day. It’s already rough enough without adding extra discomfort into the mix.

I could always walk around inside the building. I can maintain the right pace walking through the manufacturing and storage areas and I know my daily walk takes precisely twenty-nine minutes at that pace, so it would be easy to walk in lots of smaller circles instead of one big circle. The main downside is that half the reason for the daily walks is to get some sunlight exposure. Sure, there are windows and skylights in my possible indoor walking path, but it’s just not the same to get my sunlight through a window. Plus, I really do appreciate fresh air, even if it is very cold, freezes my nose, and makes me wish I could just curl into a ball, roll into the bushes, and hibernate through the winter like a cozy bear (it was just after Fat Bear Week when we got the snow, so thoughts of being warm and cozy for a good long sleep were fresh in my mind). Walking inside is good in a pinch, but I’d really rather get my sunlight, fresh air, and leg-stretch from being outside.

The worst part of all this is that the heat’s been turned back on at work. In two days, the humidity has dropped from about forty to fifty percent every day to the twenties. It will only get lower in time. My nose and hands are already suffering and it will only get worse. We hit the single digits multiple times last winter and I am preparing myself for this year to be just as bad if not worse. After all, last year’s winter was worse than every year before it, so it stands to reason that this year will be worse still. Or the same, which is still pretty dang bad considering that even using lotion regularly wasn’t enough to keep my hands from cracking and bleeding. I have delicate skin, apparently. And, you know, wash my hands a lot as part of preventing the spread of things like colds, the flu, or the ongoing pandemic. These past few winters have had me reassess my love of the cold and now I’m pretty dang sick of it. Which sucks, since I used to love it as my one escape from the constant heat of the summer because I’m a large furnace of a person. The shitty windows and poorly insulated walls of my current apartment mean I can’t actually heat a room with body heat alone anymore, since it all just gets bled right out through the metal frames and single-pane glass. You can literally feel the cold radiating off the shitty metal windows, even with plastic covering the whole dang thing. Really not looking forward to that again.