Baby, it's cold outside!

It's cold inside, too, but we'll get to that in a minute.

I don't know if you can see it or not (try shifting your viewing angle to the screen), but that's what the thermometer read at around 9:45 this morning.  Yep, it reads -20°F.  I tweaked the brightness/contrast as much as I could, but short of actually going outside to get the shot (no way in hell!), this is as good as it's going to get.

Two hours later, that same thermometer claims it's warmed all the way up to -10°F.  I am NOT happy with this state of affairs.  I hate being cold, to the extent that I have been known to sleep under a wool blanket clear up until we hit overnight lows in the mid-70's.  At present, I find myself sleeping under one electric blanket (and yes, I turn it on!), a heavy wool blanket, two light- to mid-weight blankets, a quilt, and yet another blanket that's been folded in half to keep it off of Athos' side of the bed.  I've even contemplated burrowing into one of our heavy-duty sleeping bags, and taking the electric blanket with me!

Mr. Paws much prefers to sleep in a cold room.  He uses his half of the two lighter blankets and the quilt - and usually ends up shoving the whole works off in his sleep because he gets too warm.  I wouldn't mind so much, except he shoves and kicks the covers off, and then pins them down.  

This, my friends, is a problem.  Not only because at that point it's usually somewhere around 2 in the friggin' ayem, and I'm still mostly asleep and getting colder by the minute, but because when his blankets slide off the foot of the bed, they take mine with them.  I wake up on such nights, shivering and clinging frantically to whatever blanket corners I've managed to grasp in my sleep.  

He, however, is peacefully snoring away on his side of the bed, blissfully unaware of the fact that his loving wife is, at that moment, not so loving, and may well be contemplating committing mayhem upon his person.  So far he's been saved only because retrieving a suitably mayhem-ish weapon (yeah, yeah, it's not a real word; work with me here) would necessitate voluntarily leaving the comfort of whatever bits of warmth remain to me.  Tough call; what do I want most?  Warmth or revenge justice?

So I end up muttering maledictions and yanking the blankets back up and over myself as best I can.  If I'm particularly forceful in the retrieval process, he'll wake up just enough to mumble something to the effect of Huh? What? before rolling over and going back to sleep.  Other nights he just rolls over and continues snoring.  He'd better worry that on one of these frigid nights, I'll find myself just cold and annoyed enough to seal his butt cheeks together.  Maybe that will wake him up!  (Hmm, now where did I leave that tube of superglue?)*

I suppose I should be grateful that it doesn't often get as cold as it has been this week, and that when it does, it doesn't stay that way for a month at a time, but damn!  When it's in the 50's in our bedroom, and the window looks like the photo (below) I took about an hour ago, and he's pulled my blankets off yet again, I find myself wondering if a claim of justifiable homicide might hold up in court....

Yeah, that's ice and frost you see, even after the sun had been shining directly on the window for 3 hours or so.  And the window's on my side of the bed.  So much for the value of thermally insulated double-panes....

==============

*Don't worry, I (probably) wouldn't actually do that to him.  Superglue and skin don't make a good combination.  It can cause inflammation.  ....OTOH, surgical superglue doesn't cause a localized reaction and I know where to acquire some fairly easily.  Heh heh heh