This is gonna be a chilly post

Today I'm going to take time out from whining about the presence of a screaming-at-all-hours newborn so I can whine about the weather.

Suffice it to say, it's cold outside. Cold. It's spit-freezes-on-my-lips cold. It's everything-crunches-when-I-move cold. It's spend-two-seconds-outside-and-die-of-frostbite cold. It's write-fricking-freezing-in-italics cold. It's so cold that I'm re-running old graphics because my fingers are, uh, too numb to use my graphics program.

As I've noted a time or two on this blog, I abandoned a warm-weather climate to be here, under the illusion that being near family would provide the warmth to last through the winter months. I now know that no amount of familial warm fuzzies can break through sleep-with-your-car-battery frigidity.

That said, cold weather is better than ultra-hot weather in at least one key respect -- I can bundle myself up to protect me from that cold weather, but when it gets hot various local and state decency laws prevent me from taking off a certain amount of clothing. Yet even without that legal barrier, there is only so naked a person can get.

But as my old friend Steve pointed out, when a heat wave breaks it's nice and warm, but when a cold snap breaks it's still fricking cold. And so, as I sit here while my sons' college education funds are burned in my basement furnace, I'm pondering why exactly people live in a climate like this -- or, God forbid, places even further north.

Perhaps it's a point of pride, so you can tell the world that you survive each year having your car spend each January looking like a four-wheeled version of Lot's wife. Or so you can tell wimpy, warm-climate relatives how you walked to school in the winter months with the frigid breeze hitting your face like somebody is repeatedly stabbing you in the nose with a fork he just got out of the freezer.

Maybe we like having our commutes turn into two-hour nightmares, which is what happened this morning to several of my coworkers who described white-knuckle drives into work (I and my hellish 10-minute morning commute kept my fat mouth shut). Or maybe we just feel bad for power company executives and like giving them huge portions of our monthly earnings each winter.

(That said, am I the only one that gets grumpy when I see the power company advertise? Our local electric and gas companies like giving free crap at parades, which always causes me to yell, "HEY! DON'T GIVE ME A FREE FOAM HAT I'LL NEVER WEAR! USE THE MONEY YOU'RE WASTING ON THIS LANDFILL-FILLING CRAP TO LOWER MY ELECTRIC BILL, YOU MORON!" Or at least I'm thinking it, maybe even whispering it to my wife. Stupid electric company.)

A few of us do actually enjoy the weather, like my friend Rick who takes vacations up north in February, the month when I've usually descended into cabin fever madness. Yet most of us are like me, and spend these months griping in unison.

So maybe that's it. Maybe we all just like to complain, and winter gives us several months of fodder. Then by summer all of that is gone and we're singing the weather's praises. Until it gets too hot, that is.

I now return you to your regular dose of posts about diapers and spit-up.

And lame endings about humor-blogs.com.