It’s Winter, and I live in Wisconsin

So I am trying to keep a stiff upper lip about all the snow and ice and gray skies and cold, cold wind and frozen doors and frozen toes and vitamin D deficiency and whatnot. But it is mid-February and I think I’ve had all I can take. I am feeling dull and lethargic and was acquiring a habit of eating an entire box of Girl Scout cookies for lunch, until I ate them all. That fixed that habit.


Assuming that other people are also experiencing the winter blues, here are some ideas to shake the winter doldrums:

1) Put on tropical music, dance around in your bathing suit and drink a Pina Colada. If your neighbors gape, ignore them. They are low in vitamin D and will soon forget who you are, anyway, because I think that’s something vitamin D deficiency does to people. If I remember, I’ll look that up right after I finish my Pina Colada. Plus, if you have another Pina Colada you won’t care if they gape at you. And if I have another Pina Colada, I won’t care if they gape at you either. I think we know what the answer is, here.  It starts with a P and ends with a "ina Colada."

2) Eat mushrooms. They are rich in vitamin D and taste like dirt. That is good because you won’t get anywhere near dirt for several more months because the ground is frozen fucking solid. So. Mushrooms.  For added benefit, consider putting them in your Pina Colada, like one of those cocktail umbrellas.  Let me know if you do that, because that would be too funny not to post about.       

3) If you have parents who happen to live in Florida, call them. If you don’t have parents who live in Florida, you can call my parents. They will smugly inform you that it is 70 degrees and that they slept with the windows open last night, or had to turn on the fan, blah, blah, blah. This is useful for stoking your inner fire of bitterness, and I find that it generally works better than a sauna.

4) Plant a fairy garden, because it is a form of gardening but with moss and ferns and magic.  This is a totally legitimate thing for a fully grown person to do.  Trust me.  If your kids try to play with your fairy garden, it's completely o.k. to obliquely threaten them by explaining matter-of-factly that the fairies will eat children who invade their garden.  What you have, in fact, is a garden full of child-eating fairies.You can explain that you missed that in the description when you placed the order from the fairy catalog.  Shrug apologetically and say, "Rookie mistake."

When playing in your fairy garden, make sure you have plenty of cool and interesting props (which are not the same as toys, you guys, even though they may look, at first, a lot like your seven-year-old son's Lego people and your five-year-old daughter's doll house furniture.)  If your kids try to pick a fight about whose "toys" (ahem, PROPS) you are using, do not engage.  Remind them that you are only trying to protect them from child-eating fairies.  Get up angrily and hurumph around the house for a while, muttering about how NOTHING you do around here is appreciated.  

After they go away, go back to playing with this:

5) Plan a vacation to the tropics.  If dropping the $3,000 to fly my family of five to the Caribbean is not in your budget, sitting next to the oven while making dinner and using Google Earth to look at pictures of a place where the sun has not forgotten can sometimes be a decent runner-up.  

Finally, remember that spring is just around the corner and that winter makes us heartier, better people. Then have another Pina Colada.