Once again, the Polar Vortex has returned. I am writing this the day before it arrives and brings wind-chill temperatures into the negative fifties to my area, thinking about how long it will be before we get another day where the high temperature is in the upper teens like it is today. It’s not a big deal for most. We’re used to it at this point. I even had some people make wisecracks about my shorts and how I’ll need to find some pants or whatever (I won’t be outside in the wind long enough for it to matter tomorrow). Just another normal week of incredibly low temperatures made worse by heavy wind out of the north to make the further collapse of the jet stream that once kept these polar winds north of the Canadian border ninety-nine times out of one hundred. The rest of the country, from Texas to the distant northeast, is preparing to mountains of snow. They might be relative mountains–a couple inches in texas and multiple feet, potentially, in the plains and new england–but they all promise far more snow than the area is used to. Which I’m kind of jealous of, if I’m being honest. Where I live, all we get is temperatures far too cold for it to snow or precipitate at all and occasional snowfalls. I mean, we’ve had maybe a foot of snow fall this year so far, which is up from previous years, but most of it melted after the first round and the subsequent rounds have all been relatively light. This is not an opinion I voice anywhere that people are expecting to get slammed by snow because most of those places don’t have the infrastructure required to handle it (though, to be fair, judging by how miserably any of this year’s snow has been handled, I’m not sure my home has the infrastructure to handle it anymore either) and I don’t want to come off as insensitive, but I really do miss the days of heavy snowstorms and large amounts of snow accumulation.

I am not terribly excited about the next few days. I’ll be fine, I’m sure, since I’m no longer living in an apartment that was impossible to adequately heat without plastic on the windows, but I’m not excited about needing to leave my apartment in this kind of weather. Sure, I could maybe swing a Work From Home day (I’ve got stuff I could do, certainly), but I’ve got a doctor appointment I scheduled eight months ago and I can’t afford to miss that, so I’d have to leave anyway. Plus, it’s right next to my place of employment (well, a couple minutes of driving away from it), which means I’d have to be in this area anyway…. Might as well go into the office then, you know? Especially considering how much of a hassle it is to take work-from-home days after everything that’s happened on my team in the last year. I’ll be finishing the day from home after the appointment, which means I’ll get to avoid needing to start my car in the post-sunset cold, but there’s not really a way around working in the office without burning a degree of workplace social capital that I can’t afford to let go so freely anymore. So I must emerge from my comfortable, warm apartment, go to work, go to a doctor appointment, and then finally return home to hunker down until the worst of the cold has passed. Which is worth noting: it’ll only be the worst of it. Bitter but less biting cold will linger for a while after the intense chill of the next few days departs (probably until this post goes up, even) and I can’t help but feel like all my hopes of a snowy winter have disappeared. Sure, we might get more snow later, maybe even into spring, but I’ll be tired of the cold and grey by then, and largely unable to enjoy it as a result. You know, if it actually shows up. It still might not. We’ve had a lot of cold, dry winters these past few years, after all.

That’s what’s really killing me these days, to be honest. I’ve gotten over my issues with feeling cold thanks to my thirds winter in a row of not needing to stress about staying warm in my home, but no amount of adjusting will help me with how absolutely dry and suffocating my office is. I can feel my eyeballs shriveling in my head over the course of the day. I can see the skin on my hands ashing up, splitting, and starting to bleed as I wash my hands mutliple times throughout the day, more than normal as a result of how much water I’m drinking so my throat doesn’t dry out and I don’t feel as dessicated on the inside as I do on the outside. It is a time of aching joints, dried-out eyeballs, sharp pains in warm water, and peeling cuticles as my fingers seem to get hit worse than any other part of me. I’d prefer it if the temperature in the office was lower, if it was in the high sixties or hovering right at seventy, but I can deal with the heat since any amount of sweat I’d be producing from it is more or less instantly wicked away by the dry air. I just wish I wasn’t worried about getting a nosebleed or about tightening my fists too much and causing myself to bleed as the taught skin on my hands splits. I am even using lotion as much as possible and all it has managed to do so far is slow down how quickly my skin dries out. It can’t keep up with all my hand washing now that I’m drinking maybe double the water I normally do.

The only consolation I can take from this, as I face bitter cold to go into my incredibly dry workplace, is that at least this means that the HVAC is doing its thing and moving the air around a lot. That’s what made it so dry in the first place. It didn’t used to get this bad, but when they upgraded the system to move the air more after Covid-19 hit, they didn’t really do much to maintain any level of humidity in the building and now it’s just constantly dry when the heat is on (according to the little sensor next to my office, door, we’re at eleven percent humidity right now, and it’s only going to get worse). I can’t wait for this to be over, for temperatures to settle back down, and for us to hopefully get more snow. I’m very jealous of the winter my friends are experiencing, with lots of snow and above-zero cold temperatures. It would be so nice to actually want to go outside in this crap, rather than have to repress a shudder at the thought of sitting in my car, wind blocked, while I wait for it to warm up once I leave the doctor’s office… Really not looking forward to needing to exist as a person in the world after this cold wind descends…