Ice Age

It is currently 19 degrees Fahrenheit here in Nashville.   When I woke up, it was 1.  So it's balmy in comparison.

We got about eight inches of snow on Sunday and Monday.  It hasn't been above freezing.  The main roads are in decent shape, the side roads are basically ice at this point.

Tomorrow, it gets above freezing for a bit, and I intend to make the best of that by going to Atlanta.  I had a trip to Chattanooga stashed in there, but the in-person meeting is now all-virtual.  And that's fine.  Really.  Because I don't want to have to get dressed and go into the office when it's this cold.  Who does?

I barely want to get out of bed.  I had to wash my hair this morning - it was unavoidable.  And that was painful.  Also, my skin feels like sandpaper.  I wish I felt like a lizard.  I wish at the moment, I was a lizard staying warm on a rock in Mexico.  Or somewhere tropical.  Even a heated rock in a pet store would work.

Not to put too fine a point on it - I'm cold.

And that's been my entire preoccupation for the past few days.  Remind me of this come July when I am whining about the heat.  Though I do find going from hot to cool is a faster transition that cold to warm. That's just my observation.

Anyway, everyone talks about the weather, nobody does anything about it.  So true, so true.

In other news, we just finished a limited animated series called Carol and the End of the World. Netflix.  It was, as the name may indicate, depressing.  Basically, a woman with a dull life decides to spend the remaining months before the earth is destroyed by a meteor working in an office building at a job known as "the distraction".  The other people working there, like her, need some sort of way to cope with the spectre of death looming over them.  They come into this office.  There she befriends two colleagues, and intermittent hilarity ensues.

There are some subplots - her parents and their throuple partner, Michael, take a cruise that looks like it's going to end in disaster, but is miraculously saved.  Her sister Elena visits and they go camping. She has a one night stand with a man who is falling apart.  There's an episode with him and his son that is one of the best of the series.  There's one entire episode committed to the backstory of a lie that Carol is telling her parents.

It's bleak.  We both watched it and talked about it, poking holes in plot here and there.  I think it's a good parallel of how some people coped with the pandemic, but it's your basic endtimes dramedy.

To that point, the Emmys just came and went.  I didn't watch a ton of the stuff up for awards, but I will say this.  I watched season one of The Bear.  It's not a comedy.  It's a drama with some comedic elements.  But it's not a comedy.  I can only think of one scene where I laughed, and that's when they were at a kids' birthday party and managed to spike the punch with some sort of medication - all the kids were asleep and sprawled out on the floor.  And that's some pretty dark humor, folks.

But the Emmy people know what they know, and so it's the Best Comedy.  

I will say, I'm a fan of Quinta Brunson and Abbott Elementary.  Maybe I'm a fan because it's such an underdog - network show, network restrictions.  But it's a wholesome show, a workplace comedy where the kids are incidental.  I have had colleagues like hers.  All of them, over a period of years.  It's a funny little show with some heart.

Sometimes, I realize I'm just getting old.  I miss network sitcoms, working in an office with other people. Department stores.  Real, mailed letters.  Bookstores, department stores (with real inventory).  Look, I'm not saying everything was better once upon a time, but...some of it was.

I dream of cherry pie, candy bars and chocolate chip cookies, as the Talking Heads might say.

Weirdly, though - I'm not currently jonesing for sugar - there are a number of reasons, many of them are dumb, but mostly because in cold weather, I want carbs, yes - but I want salty carbs.  Bean and ham soup, stew, mashed potatoes.  Grits.  I am a grits-seeking missile.

That's all I have, though.  It's cold.  It'll be cold for awhile, and then, suddenly, it won't.

ae