Still Cold

There once was a time when I thought I wanted to live in Alaska.  My sister lives there now and is constantly bugging me to come visit -- and maybe look for a job up there.  But when I check the weather app on my phone and see that her high tomorrow is supposed to be -2, um, I think not. 

I could handle the cold a lot better when I was 20. 

It's a common misconception that introverts don't like to talk about the weather.  It's considered small talk, which we hate.  Sure, the standard "hot enough for you" is dull and uninteresting, but that isn't weather.  That's just small talk.  Me, I'm pretty much a weather geek, but I came by it honest.  

My dad was the original weatherholic.  When they first came out with the Weather Channel, he was in hog heaven.  He'd sit his rocking chair right in front of the TV and watch it all day long.  That was before they had all these shows.  It was just weather forecasts and stuff.   When his kids were all scattered to the four winds, he would write the forecast for wherever we were in his weekly letter to us.

For as long as I can remember, he had his own little weather station set up in our back yard.   He had a thermometer, a rain gauge, a wind speed thing, a barometer, a thing that measured the humidity, and a thermometer that recorded the high and lows for the day.  The first thing he did when he got home from work every day was to grab his little notebook and record the day's weather conditions. 

That thermometer he had, the one that recorded the highs and lows, I'm not sure how it worked, but you had to get a magnet to pull the mercury back down to the bottom.  One summer, I was about 10ish, playing in the back yard, I discovered that I could get that magnet and move that mercury all around.  If you tapped the glass tube just right, you could break it into bubbles, and move them up and down, smush them together, then break them apart again. 

I played with it for a while, then went on about my business and pretty much forgot about it.  My dad got home from work, grabbed his notebook, and went out to record the weather, as was his custom.

He came back into the house, straight over to me, and said, "Don't ever do that again."  How he knew it was me, I've never been able to figure out, but somehow, he knew. 

Oh, look.  Here's a hat.

I find myself strangely reluctant to finish this hat.  Working on it just seems tedious. 

Then again, that may be the 3:30 mornings.