Not Staying Warm

It's a simple fact of human history that we learned how to keep warm even before we sharpened a spear or wiped our butts. And yet, with the accumulated wisdom of countless millennia, from cultures developing independently in Europe, Asia and the Americas, pushing even to the extreme poles, of people who universally have learned to find some comfort in the midst of snow and freezing winds, with all of this, I am still not able to get my feet warm in this over-sized cracker box of a house in Florida, and we have more cold weather to come.

Yesterday we had a Deadwood marathon with a friend, all of us with several layers of clothes, thick sweaters, sitting under blankets, drinking hot tea and coffee and still unable to breath a relaxed breath, only to then go out for dinner, hoping for some relief and maybe a seat next to the open-pit grill, but no, the people in the restaurant were bundled up like refugees in a bleak post-Stalinist Moscow tenement, huddled over glasses of hot tea for warmth, looking around and bleating like confused sheep in a drafty slaughter house.

And speaking of Deadwood, in three seasons of the show there was not one snowfall, no hint of the truly cold winters in that part of the country (the Dakotas). Why? Because being cold is not dramatic or fun, which is one reason we moved to Florida anyway. And besides, I'm still coughing and fighting off a cold and I have this weird condition where my body heat escapes and I turn into a 3-year-old girl who has just dropped her ice cream cone on the ground and who cries until someone does something, only I'm still cold.

On Saturday, in the cold and rain, we took Bingo to his secret training camp in the woods. He thoroughly enjoyed himself.

So how is it that dogs are comfortable with no clothes on at all? What the heck is going on? Will someone please turn on the heat? (The whining will continue until this is resolved.)