Cold

snowy morning backyard theo and django
Originally uploaded by mygothlaundry

It is ridiculously cold here. Twelve, in fact. Zero this morning. You already know that, but I feel compelled to add my voice to the frozen chorus of stunned Ashevilleins. Yesterday since young M has gone off to Baltimore to seek his fortune or something (and I miss him horribly, already) I was faced with the quandary of what to do with the dogs in the sub 20s (look, we're nominally in the South. Sub 20s is to us as sub zero is to more winter hardened Yankee types) weather. I opted to leave them outside and fret about them all day, even though they have a covered porch, an even more sheltered spot on that porch under a big table, the remnants of an old sleeping bag and my mother's ugly summer bedspread to curl up on. I felt horribly guilty even so and when I got home I was all freaking out and afraid that they would either be small frozen dog mummies like the Iceman or at the very least have frostbite. They were fine, if exhausted, and Theo was acting all tragic, which effect he achieves by holding his treat getting paw up pathetically, but they were fine. I couldn't live through the angst again, though, so today they're in the house while I'm at the office for the afternoon and I'm just hoping that I won't go home to shredded mayhem. Oh please, oh please, but I couldn't leave them outside when the thermometer was sitting there at zero.

Because it is so cold, I'm having something of a fashion conundrum that is compounded by the fact that I haven't done laundry in a little too long. There were some vague rumblings that sounded like I might finally actually own my house (one of these days I will explain this whole mess, but not today) and since I have sworn that the first thing I'm going to do when that happens is get my own washer and dryer, I delayed on the weekly laundromat trip. Also I'm lazy. And cold. At any rate, I solved this clothing problem by staying in my pajamas on Wednesday and on Thursday, wearing my purple woolly argyle tights under an ankle length black skirt with several layers over it. I have come to the conclusion, by the way, that I am just too old to wear purple argyle woolly tights out in the open where they are visible. It's a sad but true fact of life. They're incredibly comfortable and warm though, so under the skirt they go. Today, I was a bit stymied but finally layered myself satisfactorily in heavy tights and heavy thigh high woolly socks over those and a heavy dress and a sweater and Aunt Claire's coral beads and so on. Then I bethought myself of my ankle length black coat. Did you know I had an ankle length black coat? No? I tend to forget it myself. It is soft and fleece and sort of shapeless and very warm and, as noted, ankle length and black except for all the cat & dog hair. I put it on and looked in the mirror. Apparently I've never looked at myself in the mirror while wearing this coat before. I looked like the Angel of Death and/or an escapee from an extremely Goth sanitarium in a very cold country, possibly Mars. So it is still in the closet collecting a new coat of fur because, honestly, downtown Asheville is weird enough without the Angel of Death - a soft, fuzzy, shapeless Angel of Death but still - striding around in it.

In other news, young M is in Baltimore, A is recovering from her kidney infection just fine, I am all better from my cold although I had a really hard time waking up this morning which was weird but may have had something to do with the very, uh, interesting dream I was having about somebody named Bernie, and I don't even know anyone named Bernie. I think I'm turning into that Charles deLint character whose dream life is more real and more interesting than her waking life. Scratch that. I think I've been her for a while now. O has returned safely to California, my brother N is moving to Albuquerque, the QOB's heat has been fixed and Pebble is completely fascinated by the printer. Oh and I still hate Facebook but there it is, inescapable.