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.