greetings from the dystemperate zone!

I have to tell you the truth: I was afraid. I was afraid of the cold in Buffalo. Dreading the wind and snow like the thin-skinned southern peach I've become. It didn't help that as we flew in on the plane from Charlotte, when we began our descent and broke through the cloud cover, you could suddenly see that the ground below was covered in snow. Half the people on the plane yelled out, "NO!" A man behind me yelled "Disgusting!"

When I was ten, I would have been yelling, "YES!" Even when I was twenty. But it's true what they say about being thirty... I am a grown-up boring flabby slob who can't even tolerate a little snowstorm. That's what they say, right?

Anyhow, it was dang cold in Buffalo, and for the first two days I bundled myself pathetically in a parka and sprinted the block from the hotel to the conference center every time I had to go outside. But Friday it snowed, a beautiful heavy snow that didn't seem to slow the city down at all. They plowed, they sanded, they went about their business like nothing had happened. The last time we had snow in Raleigh, we got a quarter-inch dusting, and in a mass panic that actually made national news, the city SHUT DOWN. School buses were stuck on the road for upwards of four hours. Several hundred children and teachers actually spent the night at school. People who commute twenty minutes home spent three or four hours and many ran out of gas on the highway, sitting in gridlock. All because of 1/4 inch of snow in the middle of the day! Relatives from New Jersey called to jeer us for several days afterwards, and they had every right to. It was embarrassing. So this ease with beautiful, snowy weather made me envious. I wanted to be like that.

By Friday night, the cold didn't seem so cutting. Saturday during breaks from the conference, I discovered how refreshing it was to go outside and take a brisk walk with a light fleece jacket on. The cold could feel GOOD! (Of course, after sitting for three days in 8-hour-a-day-straight meetings, almost anything else felt pretty good).

Sadly, I had no free time to find yarn stores or SnB's, but I got plenty of secret Xmas knitting done during the many hours of sitting still in a conference room. I also got to take a toxic tour of the neighborhood surrounded by Buffalo's many chemical plants (more on that another time), and I got to see Niagara Falls. Which will be the subject of another post, because there is just oh! so! much! to say. It's nice to be home, where my 62 degree house feels a little chilly.