Excuse me a moment while a go and reheat my hot chocolate

It is cold today.

It is 18 degrees or something like that now. It is very rarely that cold here. Rarer still, it is going to stay below freezing for days. At some point Wednesday night or early Thursday morning, it dropped below freezing, and it is going to stay below freezing til sometime Saturday or maybe Sunday. That just doesn't happen here very often. It will get below freezing overnight, but then about lunch time it will warm up again, even if it is only temporary and freezing again the next night.

Well, I did not think this was going to be any great deal to me, as I do not have a job or school now, and I have no great need to go out and do much. And even if I did have someplace to go, cold is usually just cold, and it doesn't mean anything particularly bad unless it also comes with ice, and for there to be ice there has to have been rain or snow or something before the freeze, or sleet or something during the freeze. And there had not been rain that I could remember, and last time I checked they weren't expecting any, so I probably did not pay that much attention.

When ice is expected, we all go out to the grocery store and load up on stuff. If we don't do this we will run out of eggs, bread, milk, tissue paper, etc.... And while we are there getting that important stuff, we might as well load up on ice cream and cookies and spaghetti sauce and chips and who knows what else.

This practice has always seemed a little odd to me. The tissue paper I cannot live without, but even if I run out of milk and eggs and bread, that does not mean that I'm in danger of starving to death. There is still plenty of stuff in cans and stuff in the freezer. Would it be that bad if we ate our cereal without milk, or if we baked cookie dough and the frozen pizza and ate those for breakfast instead of eggs?

Okay, so it was just supposed to be cold, not ice on the roads, but it just happened to be Wednesday, and the grocery ads came in the mail, and I thought that I might as well get some stuff before it got cold. And there did not seem to be that many people in the store, except that there was fighting over particular parking spaces, and everyone who did get into the store seemed to be in line at meat counter.

I rarely need anything from the meat counter itself, but the thing I wanted either wasn't in the case or it was marked wrong, so I had to stand in line. Except, I couldn't figure out where it was that I was supposed to stand in line.

Usually, when there is a counter like this for meat or seafood or for cutting fabric at the fabric store, you have to wait in line and probably take a number if it is busy. And usually, it is only busy on Saturday, and the rest of the time you just walk up and get what you want.

So, there are all this people at the meat counter, and all I want is two pounds of chicken. Now, if this is all one long line, the line probably starts way at the other end of the counter. If, however, there is a separate line for chicken and a separate line for beef and so on, I cannot stand in line there, or else the guy dealing with the chicken will never see me.

So I asked a couple of women in line if it was just the one line, and they ignored me, cause I wasn't speaking Spanish. So I asked a few more people, and they didn't seem to know either, they were just waiting where they thought someone might notice them. And I couldn't see if there was one of those things that gives you a number.

So, I gave up trying to be nice and walked up to the employee nearest the chicken and asked him if it was just the one line, and he didn't seem to understand what I was saying either, but he did not send me to the back of the line and I got my chicken after he finished what he was doing.

Okay, so I have chicken and a bunch of veggies, and I pay for my stuff and go home. Usually, I might go to a second store and get more stuff, but the temperature dropped somewhat while I was in the store, and I decided to skip it. Besides, it was getting too close to five o'clock for my liking. You do not want to be in that store at five o'clock.

So, I have food, I already had tissue paper, I don't have to go anywhere, etc.... And my husband's schedule sucks right now, but that also means that he doesn't have to go anywhere either. Wednesday was his last day for the week. We could stay indoors and cook and be warm.

Of course on Thursday, he insists on eating lunch at Arby's. I say that I don't want to go out, and that we have food, but he says that he has to go out anyway to drop off a package, so while we are out we might as well eat at Arby's while we are out. And as long as we are going to Arby's, we might as well go to that other grocery store, as the Arby's in located in the parking lot of the grocery store.

So now we have a case of ramen noodles and a case of mac and cheese, and we have tortillas and a few other things. And we have crackers to eat with our soup, if ever we get off of our lazy a**es and make any soup. And it will be much colder today than yesterday, and there is that whole wind chill factor thing, and we really have no excuse to go anywhere today.

I did notice some odd things when we were out yesterday. It was cold, but somehow it wasn't that cold except for a gust of wind here and there, but to hear all the talk I was thinking that the wind was going to be constant.

And there were puddles of water on the ground. So that was odd. For one thing, I don't remember it raining, so where did the water come from? And it if stays below freezing, shouldn't it be ice instead of a puddle of water? Still, the actual ground temperature is a bit warmer than the air, but the way everyone was going on about the cold, I was surprised that it got warm enough to melt the ice.

I am still not sure where the ice came from. I was paying attention until Wednesday, and there wasn't supposed to be any ice, just cold. But now there is water on the ground, and Wednesday night there was talk of having the sand trucks ready to go, and Thursday morning there was ice on the bridges and overpasses, and there were cars stuck on them, and some areas were closed while they tried to get the sand trucks where they were supposed to go, and the schools were "delayed" and a few of them were closed.

Anyway, I am not terribly cold, I'm just wishing that maybe someone would have given me some soft boots for Christmas, something that I would just wear around the house when I am too lazy to put on real shoes.

And my hot chocolate has gone cold again.