Winter Is Coming

Today, I have a day off work. I had a monster 10 hour sleep and have spent the day so far in a grumpy stupor, with the sense of purpose and I.Q of a single celled amoeba. Must nearly be winter.  

The only thing that's made me laugh once today was remembering the dream I had last night where I found out that A likes to dress up as Mrs Doubtfire at fairgrounds so that no one  discovers his severe addiction to claw machines and arcade games.

I was going to make this post about how much I hate the colder months. I have enough reasons to write a short, (and probably pretty boring) book. To name a but a few:

1.  Winter makes me miss the glowy, comforting feeling of sunshine on my skin. Because I'm numb to all sensation under a billion layers of clothing. 

2.  Running when it's windy makes me feel all warm (translate: furious) and tingly (murderous and/or stabby) inside.

3.  Lack of sunlight magically transforms me from a grinning, manic, outdoorsy type to a sniveling, manic hermit who hates everything and everyone. Taa-bloody-daa!

As you can see, this kind of list wasn't going to do anyone any favours (but who am I trying to help because I  hate you all and why is my nose so bloody COLD?!), so I've decided to turn my idea on its arse and dredge up some reasons why winter is secretly awesomeness in (very convincing, mind) disguise. Plus, I've just eaten a pork panini, and I thought I'd ride the temporary food-high to positive-land like a meaty unicorn made of bread.  So, here is why winter is [swallows. Hard] ... good:

1.  Despite its numbing qualities, it's fun to deploy the coat with the big, furry hood and imagine you're an Eskimo bear on an adventure whenever you go outside. Grr!

2.  When it's not windy, running in the cold beats running in the heat, hands down.  You no longer feel like you are sweating from the eyeballs.

3.  PUDDLES!!  If you live in Wales, then this also applies to summer, but hey ho.

4.  Aside from at Christmas time, cities become quieter havens where you and a select few of your fellow voluntary loner/would-totally-be-a-hermit-if-society-didn't-frown-upon-it types can enjoy magazines and blogging on the sly in coffee shops (Hello from Waterstones!  I'm going to buy some crisps now).

5.  Christmas is awesome, despite what the Scrooge-y types say.  How can you hate a season that permits the display of excessive fairy lights and mismatched tat?  Tis the season to be gleefully naff.

6.  Onesies.  I just bought my first of the season.  It's a men's dinosaur one, complete with dinosaur head hood. I win at life.

 

Look how ferocious I am.

7.  You can justify your out of control caffeine addiction as comforting beverage consumption that you need to keep you warm.  Because it's hard to stay cold when you've got the involuntary shakes.

8.  Laziness is encouraged.  How can you be expected to go out in that?!

9.  The chaos Britain descends into when a solitary snowflake drifts to the ground.  Don't moan about how rubbish we are in adverse weather on Facebook.  Embrace it!  Wear your emergency snow helmet (the one with the viking horns and tinsel on it) and knee pads to work and pray with all your might that today is the day you get to go home to your pyjamas and the cat at 1pm on a Tuesday.

10.  Slippers.  It's hard to stay angry when your feet are covered in a toasty layer of fluff.

So, there we are.  Winter's not so bad!  And if my list has failed to cheer you fellow winter grouches, I assure you that eating lots of food will  spike your mood for at least thirty glorious minutes - enough time to quickly bash out a blog post before you crash face first into your tea, weeping because you don't live in Australia, where it's always hot and there are koalas and other things that are infinitely cooler than what we've got in stupid, cold Britain.

Stupid winter.

Morning Demons

It's the weekend!! Sun is shining.  Six Nations rugby is on, and excitement hangs in the crisp, chilly air all throughout Wales.  It's time to crack out the Welsh cakes and have a shandy or six!

And I'm in work.

Don't worry, I'm on my lunch break.  So no need to tell on me, slacker Nazis! *glare*

Surprisingly, I don't feel too gloomy about having to be in an office while everyone else out there in The Big Wide World is having fun and readying themselves for a day at the pub.  I have one of the more relentlessly chipper members of staff working with me today, so it's hard to keep the frown smeared on my chops.

Wasn't feeling quite so tolerant this morning though.  I am categorically, 100% NOT a morning person.  Morning me can only stand 3 things in the wee hours of the day.  These are:

* Coffee
* Hugging
* The snooze button

If whatever is being offered to me isn't one of the above, I am not interested, thanksverymuch.  While Morning Me tries to be fair and hate everything equally, there are a few things that make her feel more murder-y than others.  Inexplicably, these are things that don't generally even register on Daytime Me's radar, let alone bug her.  But to Morning Me, the below are things that I'm convinced exist solely to crawl under my skin to make my brain go into short fits of blind rage expressed as  "fuckingbastardsmphmphmorningfuckertwatmphmumblemumble" because I'm too foggy-brained to vent my overblown anger better:


- Waking up even a nanosecond before the alarm goes off.
-  That strangled crunching noise my car makes when I try to clonk it into third gear. "SQUEEECRUNCHEEEEKTHUD!"
- Morning People. Those freaks of the dawn hours who bounce out of bed, fully suited and booted with stupid grins on their stupid faces.
- Rifling through the floor-drobe (wardrobe alternative to the young and hip like myself) for clothing that doesn't smell and isn't creased, hating myself with a passion for not hanging shit up like grown-ups are supposed to.
- Battling the straw nest situation atop my head with heated tongs only for it to form into devil horns the second I leave the house.

I'm aware of how petty these things are, but in the morning, before I give myself a chance to come around, they are world-ending, red-eye-turning, possessed-scream inducing banes of my life.  For this reason, I would like to call upon other sufferers of morning demonic-ness to band together as one in spreading word of our plight.  Awareness must be raised, and I feel that it would be charitable of the Morning People I hate and envy so much to form a morning army of sorts.  If this were to become a working idea, it would be the morning army's responsibility to:

- Wake us up gently with coffee and hugs, but not, I repeat NOT before the alarm goes off.
- Drive our semi-lifeless bodies with quiet patience to work, in cars that don't make crunchy noises.
- Continue not to talk to us unless absolutely necessary until it is at least 10am and the light has turned back on in our eyes and we can function as humans again.

Not too much to ask, is it?  In return, us Non-morning People will gift you with snacks and beverages in thanks throughout the day, and promise not to bug you too much when our energy levels explode just as you're winding down at the end of the day.  The world as a whole, I truly believe, will be a much happier place.