Good Things About It Being This Cold

I like to think that I am an optimist. When Life gives me lemons, I squeeze all of the juice out of them to get acid with which I can make an underwear bomb, then I throw the pulp and lemon skin back at Life and say nasty things about his mother. "I don't need your stinking pity lemons, Life!"

With this in mind, as I sat in my car this morning waiting for the engine to warm up and the defroster to melt a big enough hole in the windshield so I can drive to work, I started to think about just how much this totally sucked. By this I mean: EVERYTHING.

For one thing, I'm in a car. I don't like being in a car ... unless I've got my bike in the back of the car and we're heading somewhere nice for a bike ride. I really prefer to just get on my bike and bike somewhere nice for a bike ride, and then bike back home, and leave the car to rot in the driveway.

I dislike cars -- yes, even the RAAMinator -- so much that I've taken to not parking the RAAMinator in the RandoCave. Three cars in the RandoCave means that there isn't much room to work on bikes, and since the weather has been too cold to ride bikes, the only quality time I get to spend around my bikes is when I'm working on them. This is why all of my bikes are so clean right now. Obsessive-compulsive clean. You can eat off of them, although the food tastes slightly of orange ... probably because of all of the citrus-based degreasing cleaner I use. Eating off of them gives me an excuse to clean them again, though.

So, this morning, I'm sitting in the RAAMinator listening to the radio that is turned up really loud so I can hear it over the air blasting out of the defroster. Some idiotic drivel comes on ... a bad cover of a song that sucked the first time it came out in the 70's. So I put in some Primus -- Here Come the Bastards -- and turned it up even louder. I'm thinking that maybe the neighbors can even hear it now ... and I don't care. Let 'em listen to some weird metal in 5/4 time for a while, I think. Mess up their bourgeois brains.

Grumble, grumble, grumble. You know I'm in a pissy mood when I'm willing to use time signatures as a weapon.

Fortunately, my caffeine was finally kicking in by then, so I decided to think about some of the good things about it being this cold. Here's what I came up with:

1. My bikes are cleaner than they've ever been, and are all in good working order. Of course, this made me think about how prime they are right now for riding ... so I moved quickly to the next good thing.
2. I've been able to spend time on various home-improvement projects inside Stately Rando Manor. The RandoCave is now well organized, and RandoGirl and I just finished converting one of the spare bedrooms to a workout room. We moved most of the furniture out and put noise-dampening and sweat-absorbing mats on the floor. Her new rollers came yesterday (a birthday present ... although it took them over a month to build and ship them), and those went in. I also put the trainer and other assorted exercise stuff up there, and will move the spin bike and treadmill in later this week. To top it off, we put in a nice television and DVD player. Now I can go up there and bike inside.
   Oh, goody. Better move on.
3. Nothing could possibly survive this cold, particularly mosquitoes. I have a theory that mild winters mean buggy summers; the past couple of winters have been somewhat warmer than usual, and it sure seemed like we had lots of gnats. This spring, we should have fewer problems because the gnats and mosquitoes and horseflies will be dead. Dead, dead, dead! Yes!

And that really cheered me up.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any other good things about this cold. If you've got anything, leave it in a comment. In the meantime, I'm just going to focus on dead insects, which will make me happy.