Sherri Cornelius

(Had to change the title from 4 to 9. Who knew an Ice Age 4 was actually coming? Did anybody watch 3?)

I never did find my camera cord, so I guess I’ll never get those ice storm pictures uploaded. I’m sure I put the cord somewhere that made sense at the time, but only my other personality knows where it is.

I’ll go on record as saying this is the strangest winter I can remember. Normally here in Oklahoma we have a couple of little snows a year, with one big, bad winter storm every two or three years. Ice, snow, power outages, the whole shebang. Any accumulation melts within a day or two, at the most a week, and many times I can remember wearing shorts one week and earmuffs the next. We don’t have extended periods of deep cold. My pear trees try to bud a couple of times every winter, it can get that warm.

This season we’ve had a blizzard with record snow totals followed by a cold snap that kept the snow around for weeks, an ice storm with record ice accumulation and another record snowfall on top of that, with a bunch of little snows in between. I’m seriously thinking of investing in a snow shovel. Yesterday I bought a chainsaw so I could cut up all the limbs that fell off the trees, and if it will ever stop snowing I will do that. Lingering snow makes me nervous. I’m used to the landscape looking a certain way, so those few weeks when the snow just stayed gave me a constant, vague feeling of suspicion.

People like to say, “I thought the globe was supposed to be getting warmer, yuk yuk.” Well of course if the global average temperature is raised or lowered it will cause weather patterns to shift, and that means different weather, not necessarily warmer all the time. I don’t know if global warming is real or not, and frankly, I’ve stopped caring. I live as simply and consume as little as I can, and that’s all I can do.

Not sure I’ve ever been this ready for spring. Geez.

Daylight savings time has ended, and I feel better for it even though it feels like I’m behind because of the time change. It’s sad, though, that the end of daylight savings signals the end of summer fun. We don’t need an extra hour of daylight in the bleakness of winter evenings (chah, right!). Now is the time when we hunker down in our caves and wear thick socks in the house–and still our toes are cold–and fifty-degree days seem like a little piece of Heaven come to Earth. (This is Migraine Season for me, because with all those people inside and little ventilation, it’s like swimming in a fragrance stew. I don’t know why people have to wear perfume to school functions, especially when we’re all packed in like sardines. It’s not a fancy night out on the town, it’s “Here Comes Santa Claus” forgodsake. Anyway, that is something upon which I shall not dwell, so let us change the subject, yes?)

Lots of you are doing NaNoWriMo, which I like to think of as NaNoNoMo. I have to maintain this level of don’wanna, lest I be sucked in or feel left out. I wish you guys all the luck in the world, truly, and I hope you win and publish the resulting novel and make a million dollars. Truly. Good luck.

Instead of NaNoNoMo, I will be finishing my seemingly interminable WIP, as well as editing a new project for Eternal Press. I will have to shut down my Facebook cafe and let the farm go to seed (and if you play any of those Zynga games you’ll know exactly what I mean) for the month of November. So really, I will probably be doing the same word count as I would if I participated in NaNo, only without the distractions, i.e. cameraderie and tangible goals. Well, that’s not exactly true. My goal is to finish WIP by Christmas, and I have only a month to edit the assignment, pretty tangible.

Sometimes I get depressed this time of year, as do many of you, but this year I’m taking steps to sidestep depression. I’ll be taking lots of vitamin D, making time for fun stuff, talk to friends whenever I feel isolated. Hit my first speedbump this morning, though: the van may have finally died, which means DH will be taking the car to work, which means I’ll have no way of getting out of the house during the day, when I need to most. God, I’m depressed already. Where’s that damn vitamin D?