This Cold & Rainy Day

There's a sense one gets living in Texas which is the same sense I imagine that folks in Southern California have, which is, the feeling that, you know, we don't really have weather.  In California, I'm sure it's mostly pleasant, but in Texas, it's not - it's just hot.  It's hot when you get in your car, it's hot when you wake up early to walk the dogs, it's hot when the sun goes down & the day's heat just radiates off the ground.  Some people are cool with it - my wife is a reptile so she loves it - but most aren't.

Yeah, okay, it does get cold.  Today it was around 41 degrees.  Yesterday it was twice that - 82 degrees.  In a couple of days it'll shoot back up into the 60s.  I used to tell folks that when the temperature started dropping in Kentucky, it was going to keep going down until Spring.  In Texas, it may be cold one week & then, in the middle of what might be called autumn or winter, weirdly it'll climb into the 90s.

& that's why we're so unprepared for it.  We think it's always hot here because it's usually hot here.  I don't have the statistics but if we consider any temperature over 80 degree Fahrenheit as "hot," there for probably like eight or nine months of the year it's hot.

What do you do on a day like today?  I'm wearing my KNON hoodie, long pants for the first time in months, & those fingerless hobo gloves I have to wear because my hands get cold despite the furious typing on the keyboard.  I walk outside & can see my breath, I tremble when a freezing wind hits me, my legs are cold.  How long has been since my legs have been cold?

Oh, & it rained all day today.  Our backyard looks as though it might be good for rice cultivation.  My poor dogs have been discussing learning how to use the facilities indoors.

What I wish I could do is enjoy it.  But after months of heat, it doesn't feel real - & in a sense, it isn't, as it'll be hot again soon enough.  This is a problem.  A problem with living in a place where the weather is the same, more of the same, it's the same, hot & hotter.

Fuck it, I'm going to go stand outside & pretend I live somewhere where the middle of October is discernibly different from the middle of September.  Or November.