I'm not a winter person

I am a New England person. If my winter doesn't have snow and cold then I feel like I'm in the wrong place.

(I've only been in a wrong place a few times. North Carolina was a wrong place to be in the winter, although all in all I had a wonderful experience there in spite of my boyfriend. New Jersey was a wrong place, not because there wasn't snow and cold, because there was, but because the locals whined and moaned and were completely unable to cope, and they did it again and again every year. You'd think they'd all just immigrated from Puerto Rico or Somalia, but no, only a few of them had. Most of them had lived there for thirty, fifty, seventy years or more.)

(Arizona was not a wrong place, because we'd had the foresight to vacation in Holbrook, which is very wintry in the winter. The Grand Canyon had snow. I'd rather die having seen the Grand Canyon with snow than having ridden down it on a burro, and now I can. Die, that is. After having seen it with snow.)

(Not immediately, though, please.)

In spite of this, I don't actually like going out in the cold. I don't like turning up the heat. I don't like the reduced hours of sunlight per day. I do like endless cups of tea, but I don't like having to drop everything and make myself more tea when I'm busy or comfortable or I have a kid climbing all over me. I don't like shoving a struggling, unwilling kid into a winter coat and trying to squeeze both kid and coat into the car seat. I don't like Riley being in the house all the time, meowing for food all day and night and pooping up a storm. Ew.

I don't like the mall at Christmas shopping season. Have I mentioned the mall lately? AwesomeCloud and I are really becoming part of the crowd there. The other mallwalkers stop and talk to us, and sometimes they walk alongside us. It's usually nice and quiet and the lighting is dim and we only have to share the mall with the custodians. At 10:00 AM, when the stores open, most of us have already cleared out.

Starting yesterday, our mall now opens at 7:30 AM. What the hell. Blaring music and blinking lights and noise noise noise. For what? Even now, nobody's there but us mallwalkers... and all the store clerks who clog up the line at Dunkin' Donuts before they open for business.

Then they sit at their cash registers and crank the individual store musics even louder because, without customers, there's nothing else to do.

Winter doesn't even really start until Solstice, the 21st or so, and then Christmas shopping season will end soon after. I only have like a week and a half left to avoid the mall. Maybe I'll go back to taking the kid outside in the morning. Because, 20 degrees or no, it's still autumn. It is. That's a fact.