I leave work at 5:01 p.m.
The sun goes down at 5:02 p.m., and my version of Twilight Saga: Hypothermia begins.
Because we skipped winter last year, I'd forgotten about it.
But during a brief brain thaw the other day, it came to me again.
I'm a mammal.
I'm supposed to hibernate.
Instead, I'm trudging around in the cold and snow.
And every evening, as I leave work and dark descends, my Twilight Saga begins again.
Instead of getting involved in a heartrending and hopeless romance and sucking blood, I crawl under the nearest afghan, armed or unarmed, and take a nap.
I fall into a restless sleep in which my feet are always cold and I dream of breaking into car repair shops, sinking my fangs in soft radiator hoses and drinking my fill of antifreeze.
A brief, happy, moment arrives when I spot antifreeze color liquids for sale as sports drinks in convenience stores. But happiness quickly turns to nightmare again.
The other day I flashed back to the a movie based on Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."
It's the story of some poor Russian political prisoner Siberia who works all day in a Siberian labor camp while being fed soup with fish eyes floating in it.
That makes it the Soviet vodka-aided hangover version of what happens every January when Christmas passes and Frosty the Snowman morphs into Charlie the Curb Crust.
The film rating bypasses PG-13 or R and goes straight to wind chill.
And that's another thing I'd forgotten about last year: the Alberta Clipper that blows through my house each winter about three inches off the floor, sending cockroaches scuttling around for their earmuffs.
Starting in November, my thinning ankle hair is whipped by steady winds of 25-35 mph winds with gusts to 45. Instead of scattering bits of branches like the outdoor wind, this wind turns the veins in my ankles blue and scattered bits of my frozen and shattered toenails around.
Since they don't seem to pick up the winds on Doppler radar, I'm thinking about taking a picture of my frost-bitten bunion with a sunset background and sending it in to Jamie Simpson.
I figure my world will be brightened, if not warmed if I hear him say "Thanks to Frostydigits in Springfield."
This winter does bring good news on the technology front.
Those cameras that allow you to see behind you while you're backing?
They mean we no longer have put our chins on the front dashboard and look through the slit the defroster has cleared at the bottom of the front windshield while waiting for the car to warm.
We can just drive backwards.
That's a plus because once the front wipers are worn down by weeks of scraping across ice, it takes less time for the wires in the rear window to melt the frost anyway. And once they're clear, we can make the switch from camera view to the large screen to navigate.
Because it's impossible to text and drive while the fingers are frozen, driving backwards may be safer, anyway.
One thing technology can't fix is age. And at mine, winter mornings involve scraping a layer of frost off my soul before getting out of bed.
Still, I am warmed by the thought that I've charted a way out of this mess.
I'm going to sign on as part of a National Geographic team that tracks the annual migration of seniors from Ohio to Florida, step by step.
It will cover:
The animal urge to migrate triggered by the combination of the angle of sunlight at the winter solstice and the urge to flee after Christmas overspending.
The insincere tearful goodbyes to relatives and neighbors soon to be abandoned to the cold.
The five-day trip through Atlanta, including driving delays at the airport.
The removal of the tarp in the carport and unchaining of the oversize tricycles chained from picnic table.
The cold, I'm afraid, has made me truly bipolar: convinced I'll have to live out my days at the North or South pole.
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