Brrrrrr!!!!

Oh. My. GOD. It is freaking COLD here.

Remember, y'all, I'm down in Florida. You know, land of sunshine, beaches, palmetto bugs. Well, the sunshine's here and the beaches remain. I'm also fairly sure the palmetto bugs are still around as well but you couldn't prove it by me because even those suckers are smart enough to hide from this weather.

It hasn't gotten as cold as they've forecast -- they were predicting mid-twenties to upper teens last night and it just hit freezing -- but cold is cold is cold.

What's worse is that since we're not used to these temperatures on an annual basis, let alone an EXTENDED basis (we had a similar snap a couple of weeks ago), many of us down here lack proper cold weather gear. Now as an adult, I remedy that by layering myself until I'm easily mistaken for the Michelin Man, but trying to convince my kids (specifically the elder) that yes, Mommy is SERIOUS when she says she wants you to wear three shirts and two coats?

Hmm... yeah, you can probably figure out about how well that's going. On the plus side, I'm older than he is and much more stubborn, so guess who wins? Hint: it ain't the nearly-ten-year-old.

Adding another bummer to the cold is the dryness of the air. Now I actually like cooler weather as opposed to the searing heat of August, but it turns out I'm definitely a hothouse flower. My hair hates humidity -- in its natural, summery state it looks like I've had inappropriate relations with a light socket (and what was I THINKING when I cut it off a couple of weeks ago? oh yeah, summer it's gonna be insane now that I've broken our mutual non-aggression pact by applying scissors and daring to try to have, say, an actual hair style), but it turns out humidity is really popular with my skin. I always tend to dryer skin anyway, and am prone to eczema unless I lube myself up daily with heavy-duty moisturizers. But with the humidity gone I'm decidedly scaly, and my hands have been particularly hard hit. I ended up breaking out the coconut oil tonight and have already rubbed several layers into them and on up to and including my elbows.

It's supposed to warm up for the weekend. I sure hope so, otherwise at the rate I'm going I'll run out of coconut oil and someone will find me crumbled into a dry, flaky pile on the kitchen floor. That's gonna be a mess to clean up.