Afternoon delight

I am jealous of Kathleen and her Nepalese hat. There's a Nepalese import store about fifteen blocks up, and I've been toying with stopping in and getting one. My daughters have them (alas, theirs are the sweatshop Target variety).

Kathleen wins the extreme weather award today. Here it is nice again, cool but not bitterly so, the land that Old Man Winter briefly forgot. On Wednesday, we didn't even make it up to the projected Lucky Seven. Two, I think was the high. One, two. Count 'em.
By Sunday, it will be 50. Where (and when) else can you have a 50-degree temperature swing in the span of four days and not question all that is right and normal? If in New York it was 30 degrees on Wednesday and 80 by Sunday, wouldn't screaming people wearing homemade placards be handing out Bibles on street corners?

On that cold, cold Wednesday, I rediscovered an innocent childhood delight. I walked across an unshoveled parking lot to my car and, as I always do, I thought I should probably walk in my existing footsteps or in tire tracks. Walking on a white sheet of snow seems, I don't know, wasteful or inappropriate somehow. But instead I said, "Damn it all," and I marched around and jumped and felt the crisp, untrammeled snow give gently under my feet. Anonymous sources report that I actually said, "Whee," but I'll never cop to it.