NaBloPoMo Day 2 – Brrrrrrrr!

This morning, I felt something I haven’t felt in a long time: cold! Most mornings, I hop out of bed, and by the time I’m brushing my teeth, I feel the first trickle of sweat running down my back. This morning, I didn’t want to get out from under the covers. Such a change! After months of brain melting heat, today’s chill is disorienting. I am so out of practice with this temperature that I barely knew how to dress. It took a while to dig up foreign wardrobe items, stuff like long pants, a sweater, and – gasp – closed-toe shoes. At one point, I was like, “Socks? Oh, yeah. I remember those.”

There is something about months of relentless heat that messes with your mind. It creates a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, in which you find yourself bonding with your captor in a twisted fashion. With cold, you can pile on comfy layers. You have options. You can resist. Heat, however, has the upper hand. There is only so much clothing one can remove, after all. There’s a point where you can no longer fight back, and heat – especially Texan heat – knows that. Texan heat demands absolute surrender.

I thought I was doing all right with the Texan heat, I really did. There is plenty of air-conditioning down here, or “air” as the Texans call it because, frankly, it’s that essential. By mid-summer, however, my perceptions were clearly distorted. One sweltering day I caught sight of my favorite cardigan innocently dangling all fuzzy and warm in the closet and thought, “When did I ever wear that?” I would have bagged up all my winter clothes to send off to the thrift store, if my boyfriend hadn’t intervened. I didn’t quite believe his claims that I would actually wear that stuff again in this lifetime (or the next), but I was too hot to protest by that point. The Texan heat had me bamboozled.

Although we look like a bunch of tie-dyed mimes, today’s photo depicts me and my pals as we appeared on this groovy infrared monitor they have at the Museum of Nature and Science at Fair Park in Dallas. That’s me in the hat and my boyfriend to the right of me. My bf’s son is on the far left, and he always has cold hands, as you can see from the image. My hands are nearly always warm, which is why they’re nice and red in this image. Seems like a quick way to assess everyone’s circulation, actually. It would make waiting at the doctor’s office a lot more fun if you could be comparing your IR image with other people’s. Think how you’d look with a fever!

And that’s it from my neck of the woods on Day 2 of NaBloPoMo 2010. Here’s how I’m doing NaBloPoMo this year. I’m just opening a file and rambling for 15 minutes each day. Whatever bubbles up is that day’s post. For writing prompts, I’m grabbing pics from my hard drive, but that doesn’t guarantee that there will be an obvious link between my words and the photos.

If there are any fellow NaBlo-ers out there, I’m curious what your strategies are for posting. Is this your first November? Even if you are not doing the NaBlo thing, please say hi! Makes me so inspired!

Oh, and get out there and vote, if you haven’t already.  It’s Election Day here in the USA, in case you hadn’t noticed…