I Looked Out the Window and It's Still Winter

This is one corner of my deck about 3 hours ago; there's more now.

It’s been another cold, gray and snowy day and every time I look out the window I’m reminded how much I don’t like winter in western PA. The temperature hasn’t been above freezing in days and, if one believes the weather mavens, won’t get there either this week or most of next. But I can deal with the cold, I really can; it’s the gray that just bums me out. And when it’s gray and snowing, I just want to pull the covers over my head and read in bed with a flashlight until April.

With all that in mind, I decided that I need to try to think on the positive side, so I leaned back in my chair and tried to think of five positive things about winter.

1. The snow really is pretty, as long as I don’t have to get out in it and before motor vehicles turn it to nasty slush. Lee posted some pics on her blog of the snow around her house and it’s quite beautiful.

2. The days are getting longer. It’s hard for me to believe that when I’m driving to work and 7:15 in the morning looks about like 10:15 at night, but they are getting longer, one minute at a time.

3. One of the bad things about winter is that it’s often too cold and nasty to go outside and walk or otherwise get exercise. One of the good things about winter is that it’s often too cold and nasty to go outside and walk or otherwise get exercise. Instead I have to stay in and stitch or read. Darn.

4. It’s fun to watch the animals in the snow. As I was leaving work the other day, I saw a flock of turkeys in an open space down the road, doing whatever turkeys do. One of them was in a tree, eating the berries or seed pods or whatever they were. Then tonight, also driving home, I was stopped behind a large truck that was making a left turn and the reason he was stopped was because there were about 15 turkeys swooping across the road in front of him. They're amazingly graceful for such large, rather unattractive birds. A few years ago in my previous employment life, several co-workers and I gathered at the windows in a fourth-floor conference room and looked down at the parking lot, watching a group of turkeys using a car for a slide. I am not making this up. The turkeys flew up in a tree, hopped down on the roof of the car parked beneath it (not mine, for which I was truly grateful), and slid down the windshield. They took turns, I swear they did. It was one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen.
(Is there a pattern to this? There really are other creatures around here besides turkeys! My guy and I saw a buck the other night but he wasn't amusing, just beautiful.)

5. There are four seasons and only one of them is winter (okay, I know I’m reaching here). The other three are considerably more tolerable and user-friendly. I’ve read that people who move to one-season climates get kind of tired of not having the other three seasons. I think I wouldn’t mind doing a little empirical research about that if the one-season climate was in, oh, San Diego or Honolulu. Maybe not so much in Barrow, Alaska, or Greenland.

Okay, that’s it, I’m taking off the Pollyanna hat now. I’ll go back to griping and complaining and marking off the days until spring, but I’ll try to do it quietly. How about you? Are you a winter person or a non-winter person?

A little Thursday evening progress on Silver Stitches:

Happy stitching!