Day 112/365 - All Bundled Up

For this week's self-portrait we have me all bundled to brave the cold. From the looks of things you'd think I was going to mush a team of huskies across the tundra, but I was just ambling down to the Corner Bakery Cafe to grab some breakfast and read the paper.

Today was an 'unscheduled leave' day for the Federal government. That means you can just up and take the day off if you want on account of the icy weather (and the fact that nearly all the local school districts are closed), but you'll get charged for a day of vacation time. Seemed like a fair trade to me today, so I decided to play hooky.

Between now and the end of the year I have to use up approximately 115 hours of vacation time or I'll lose it. Even with the Venice trip next month I'll still have over 70 hours of annual leave to spend. My niece's wedding in Texas in May will take some of that, as will the Alaskan cruise my bro wants to go on in June, and the rest I'll probably squander in dribs and drabs like today.

Now I think it's time to pop my fireplace DVD in the player, settle down in my big comfy armchair with a mug of hot chocolate, listen to my Time-Life Big Band CDs, and read some old "Terry and the Pirates" comic strips from 1939.

It's good to be the king.

(Taken with my Nikon Coolpix S200)

Day 43/365 - Big Coat Weather

I had to dig my overcoat out of the closet earlier this week and it doesn't look like I'll be putting it back any time soon. It hasn't been earmuff cold yet, but it's definitely been scarf and gloves cold in the mornings. Yesterday the temperature didn't poke its nose north of 40 degrees the whole day and tomorrow we're supposed to have flurries. Hopefully they'll last longer than the five minutes of flurries we had earlier in the week. If it's going to be cold, it might as well snow and be pretty as well.

It never actually gets that cold in this area. In the ten years I've been living here I think the temperature might have dropped into the single digits maybe 3 times and I don't think it has fallen below zero once. Usually the 20s are about as low as it gets here in wintertime. It gets much colder in Missouri where I grew up. Negative temperatures are fairly common there. Not to be gross, but sometimes it would be so cold that when I was waiting outside at the bus stop in the morning the snot in my nose would freeze up. If you've lived somewhere that gets really cold in winter, you know what I'm talking about.

Missouri regularly gets fairly heavy snowfall as well, unlike DC/NoVA. Not Buffalo or Green Bay heavy where the snow is measured in yards rather than inches, but it wasn't uncommon for us to get 10-12 inches of snow in a day when I was a kid. If DC gets half that then it's treated like a natural catastrophe of biblical proportions. Not that I'm complaining, mind you, because it means the Federal government shuts down and I get a free day off. Hopefully having a Chicago guy in the White House won't make it harder for the government to get snow days.

I need my free days off in wintertime. There are books to be read, old movies to be watched, and grilled cheese sammiches and tomato soup to be eaten.

(Taken with my Nikon D80)