18 below zero last night. I ask you. Is that even rational?

It is not. I must protest most strongly against this new fad of having cold and snow in the winter time.

As I understand it, they had some significant tornadoes in Florida last night and the news says the wind is so strong up by the Divide that it's blowing windows out of cars.

I think Mother Nature is really annoyed with us these days.

I was pondering MOPT last night and this morning. I mean, now, these days, while Mother Nature is throwing tantrums, these are the times that make you think it's about time you started doing your bit to clean up the planet and stop spewing pollutants into the air and stuff.

But! 18 below zero! I have to wait ten minutes for my morning bus and five minutes for my morning train. In the evening, I have to wait ten minutes for my return bus, five to ten minutes for my train, and then twenty-five minutes for my last bus. If I use MOPT, I'm going to lose a finger or two or maybe a toe, to frostbite. (Yes, okay, I have gloves and hats and scarves. To be honest, what I'm most worried about is my eyes. I just can't think that contact lenses and extended exposure to sub-zero temperatures would do my already aging eyes any good.)

(Based on how my car sounded when I started it up this morning, I think it might vote in favor of me taking MOPT.)

Also, the circus is back in town. More accurately, the Spanish Circus is returning to Texas. I'm getting hang-ups, voicemails in Spanish, and people who don't speak English calling to ask for tickets. Seems to me I just went through this a few months ago. How often does that stupid circus go to Texas, anyhow? And why can't they advertise their phone number(s) correctly?

What else am I grumpy about?

Not much. I had a nice, peaceful evening yesterday. I got into the Amazon Box O'Joy and started wallowing in a major Doctor Who Season Two festival.

Under the heading of, "Scarves, misc." I finished the funky black/gray scarf. It's not beautiful and it's a little shorter than I'd originally planned, but I won! Or, did I? In the end, I was reduced to actually counting stitches (Oh, the shame! I haven't had to count stitches since--since I don't know when.) and I'm always going to be ashamed of not having ripped the entire thing out and done it over properly, but I decided that if I didn't get it done and mailed, winter was going to be over.

I had a bit of that yarn left. Just out of idle curiosity, I'm trying to knit a block with the leftovers. It may be that this yarn will work better with knitting.

Or, you know, it could just have been The Skein Of Satan.

I'm starting to accumulate quite a few leftover bits of skeins. I have no idea what to do with them. There's too much of each of them to just toss out and not enough to actually do anything with.

I did not go to the grocery store, but a closer inspection of my cabinets revealed that I had enough food in there for a week.

I talked to the R.C. last night. She called up to ask whatheheck was going on, since they'd gotten an email from the Denver office saying they were closing because of the snow. I told her that the accumulation (at that time) was minor but that for some reason the storm had Denver tied in knots.

My commute? I made it to the interstate (about a mile) in under ten minutes and then spent 25 minutes going the next mile because the highway was almost at a stop. I bailed off on the first exit that would get me home, only to spend ten minutes moving 50 feet because so many people were bailing off there and trying to go south, just like me. Eventually I'd inched up enough to give up on going south and to be able to get to the northbound exit lane. I took it down to my favorite back road, one that's very flat and a good choice in bad weather, and had no more trouble.

But I marveled at the traffic nightmare around me. My car is unusually light for its size (and is, technically, a subcompact) because of not having the weight of the automatic transmission in it, but I don't think I slid at all on the way home. And yet, the radio kept talking about spinouts and fender-benders and accidents littering every road of the city.

This morning, on the way in, I saw three abandoned cars by the side of the highway. I can only assume these people ran out of gas because of sitting in traffic too long. I mean, total snow accumulation was less than 2" and none of them looked as though they'd been in accidents.