Last Week at This Time

As I was sitting down to write this, tonight, I found an old post from last September with the title "Last Week at This Time." Oddly enough, I'd been thinking about last Saturday for much of today, so when I opened the post and found it empty, I figured it was a sign that this was my topic for tonight.

You see, last week on Saturday morning, I got up early so that I could try to shovel some of the frozen whatever off of the sidewalk, then go run a bunch of errands before the temperature dropped as the "Polar Vortex" came into the state.

That afternoon was followed by really frustrating cold. No, it apparently wasn't record-breaking, but it certainly did inspire more "I do not want to live with this cold anymore" conversations than I've heard in a while.

And then we started looking at the forecasts for this weekend. The light at the end of the tunnel was a sunshine icon on the weather maps, with a notation for temps in the 20s or even 30s.

We all spent the week shivering on the sidewalks. I don't know that the interior of my car ever warmed up on any of my commutes until Thursday. I wore my gloves for driving, because the steering wheel was so cold that I think I got a contact "freezer burn" on my right hand on the one day I didn't put my glove on right after fishing my keys out of my pocket and getting into my car.

But the weather did change. And on Friday people started walking around without hats on. And I walked the pup yesterday without my gloves or hat on. And the forecast kept looking a little better.

So I decided that I would try to get up early, today, and take care of a bunch of errands - not before the temp went down, but before the crowds went up.

By the time I was at the gas station at just after 9am, I was 5th in line for the car wash - which had obviously been a very popular spot already. I did a drive-through deposit at the bank. I ran to the grocery store and didn't feel the need to bundle myself up.

When I walked the pup this evening, we went all the way around the block even though she didn't wear a coat - she didn't fuss about her feet getting cold at all. The warmer temps offered her more to sniff than she's gotten to experience in a while.

And tomorrow it might actually get up to almost 40 degrees - that's a "feels-like" difference of about 80 degrees over last week at this time.

And I'm okay with that.