In like a Lion, Now Out! Out like a Lamb!

Get lost, February. You are a terrible month. You are consistently dreary and tooth-achingly cold. You broke my auntie's hip with your icy streets. You are blustery, cruel, and so so tedious. I have no idea why we keep you around, like, ever.

Remember how I promised to do a 10K speed skating marathon? Well I registered for it during one of those winter weeks we have up here in Canukystan where it warms up enough to make snowballs and so that breathing in doesn't sear our lungs. That's when we all start remarking to each other how happy we are to see spring even though we should know better. Because BAM! We are so plunged into more weeks of crazy sub-zero frigidity and, haha! There's MONTHS of winter left.

It wears on a person that.

It is February and March with those false promises of warming and those pseudo-spring teasers interspersed with ass-breaking cold snaps and flu-seasons that just won't quit that really grind on us up here. It's the last two months of winter, in a country with six months of it, that really are the hardest.

Oh yes, while Egypt is using Facebook to foment a revolution, we Canadians are bitching about the weather and posting travel pics of our flabby white bodies in Mexico to plummet those of us without the means to fly out of this awful cold into deeper despair.

This is a very long way of coming around to say that I DID IT and it was really cold. I almost froze my braids off.

See? They are frosty braids. And there's a bit of perspiration on my chin that froze into sweatsicles.

As I was driving down into the river valley on the morning of the race, there were wind chill warnings on the radio of -35. And of course, I was all, "WHAT WAS I THINKING?"

I did my warm up laps holding my hand in front of my nose to keep it from, you know, snapping off.

And I didn't get to train nearly as much as I wanted to because of how I've been nursing at least one sick kid through a cold or flu since the beginning of time itself. So I didn't feel bad when that spandex-clad gaggle of very fast teen-aged boys sniggered at me for asking which direction the race would go, this way or that way?  They might have been sniggering at my ski goggles, anyway.

But I did it.

And of course, once you get moving as fast as you can, you stop feeling the cold and start feeling that burning sensation in your thighs and lungs.

And I'll do it again next year while February is causing me, my kids, my dog, and everyone else in this frozen wasteland we call our home and native land to start clawing at the walls.

Meanwhile we are missing mittens and he damnedest thing, there aren't any to be found in the stores. No. They are all full of sunhats and Easter dresses and SWIMWEAR. WTF??????

That always messes with my head the way the stores start selling spring stuff when it's 30 below with snowbanks up to our knuckles.

And yet, and yet... if I do the math, it's just under 10 weeks till the second week in May which is when the Almanac says is past the last frost date. Which means it's time to plant pepper seeds. Which takes the largest leap of faith when your window ledges are frosted up so's you can't see out of them.

And yet... and yet...