Yesterday Was Rainy - I'm Quite Grateful Our Temps Were Too Warm for Snow

It's nice when things go smoothly, and yesterday was a smooth day. Maybe it was because it was a cold, rather dreary day - a day more like my memories of London than a Minnesota day. With the exception of an hour or so of glorious sunshine and clear skies, we were in a drizzle for the majority of the day, and the temperatures were colder. We're nowhere close to "winter cold" yet, but our bodies have started preparing for the deep freeze. How can I tell? Well, 60 degrees F is feeling comfortable, a month or so ago, that would be feeling much colder. 

We had a light rain for most of the day. My thoughts, as 
I looked at the rain was "It's a good thing we're not 
colder - we'd have a LOT of snow out of this one." 
I guess I'm grateful for rain, because I would have 
been shoveling a LOT of snow with an additional 
30 degrees of cold. 

So bodies adapt. The seasons change gradually and we adapt to move in sync with them. It's biological, but it's also mental. We prepare, we stockpile, we plan ahead. The ground is getting covered with fallen leaves (we'll have a lot of raking to do in a few weeks), the glorious colors of autumn are starting to fade and move into the past, to leave the starkness of winter upcoming. It's time to stockpile, to play ahead, and to (in the past) try to make sure that supplies have been put aside to fend off the winter starvation that used to happen in our ancestral lives. 

In the past, in some societies, people would have a 
cold cellar or root cellar where they would store 
the harvest and canning to be used throughout the 
upcoming cold season until new crops could be 
harvested. I'm not that organized, and I'm not that 
needy, but my pantry can easily carry us a few days 
if necessary. Sometimes getting out of the house 
can be difficult in a hard snowstorm. 

Many tribes would be gathering at this time of the year. They would harvest everything they could, then pull together into long-houses or communal dwellings for the upcoming season of winter. Winter kills, without doubt. Winter is harsh and unforgiving. Mistakes can't be made - winter will capitalize on those and the spectre of death is always just around the corner. The harvests of autumn needed to be dried or canned for the upcoming harsh season, and if winter was exceptionally cold or long, people would starve to death before the next spring. 

The Spectre of Death stands in front of all of us, but in 
ages past, it was closer in the Winter than at any other 
time of the year. Winter is harsh and culls the flocks 
and herds without mercy. 

Think about it - that's where "winter weight"  comes from - that tendency of the body to realize the upcoming change of seasons and prepare with a stockpile from inside to meet the challenges of the outside. It's a bit easier for us now - those of us with roofs over our heads and central heating - but our bodies are old things. They remember their genetic heritage and they do what needs be for the upcoming season. 

Walk-about is an Australian term and activity 
that is aboriginal in origin. To have that term 
applied to a line of code that made it impossible 
for me to post properly earlier this week 
made me smile. 

On a lighter note, DW is working properly for me again. I had a delightful note from Service regarding my issue. "The developers have figured out what made the RTE go walk-about, and it's back now!" I wasn't aware that coding had the ability to go walk-about, but I'm delighted they found the issue and resolved it. I'm off to the pool for my final swim of the week. Have an excellent Thursday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini.