The Winter Chill

This weekend I embarked on a brief ten-mile run with a friend who will remain unnamed because she is a woman who's crazy enough to invite me out running.  In January.  When it's 28 degrees.  Until it drops to 25 degrees.

Then again, I'm the one who said yes to the invitation, so perhaps we make a good team in a masochistic sort of way.

When we arrived back at her house at the end of our run, her fingers were so stiff that couldn't accurately punch in the code to her garage door.  I didn't mock her because my mouth was frozen into a contorted, pained expression.  At one point during the run I had tried to tell something, only to haltingly spit out several sentences that sounded like mumbled Serbo-Croatian.

What? What are you saying? she huffed.  That you want to kick that man?

At least that's what I think she said.  My ears also were malfunctioning, so I'm not positive.

It's cold here.  Today we never got above the teens.

Yet today I bundled -- and I mean bundled -- Reese and Brooke so we could complete Reese's homework assignment to make a list of things in our neighborhood.  We walked up and down our street as I filled out Reese's worksheet because, let's face it, first-grade handwriting is slow and sketchy enough when it's not done with a little hand that's wrapped in two pairs of gloves.

Despite the recent cold, we've gotten very little snow this winter.  I know this to be true because Reese mournfully reminds us of the fact several times daily.  As we finished our neighborhood walk, the girls latched onto one brief glimmer of awesomeness in the otherwise barren-yet-snowless landscape.

It was a three-foot stretch of ice at the bottom of our driveway.


Then they did what they do best.  They improvised.



And if you think this resembles slip-and-sliding in full winter gear on pavement, that's because it pretty much is slip-and-sliding in full winter gear on pavement.

Bonus points for ingenuity, I say.

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4 comments

  1. I'm so glad I live in North Carolina. Every time I read stuff like this, I'm glad for that. Yeah, it's only 28, but that's so way better than the teens. And the ground isn't frozen so it doesn't feel 28. Body parts won't drop off if left uncovered. Ya'll have my sympathies though. :)

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  2. Wow, you've got guts. I've put the exercising on hold until spring :)
    Derm Deals

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  3. Ha ha, to them it probably does the same service as a fullsize ice rink. When I was a kid, at the bottom of our garden there was a little puddle that would freeze during cold days in the fall. It was maybe two square foot in total, and the ice was essentially just full of frozen weeds and grass. Didn't stop us from breaking out the skates, to the exasperation of our mom.

    Child Anxiety

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  4. I love this, Ann!  These things just make so much sense in the minds of children.

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