Cold in the Ocean State

Well, apparently winter is here. We had our first coating of snow for the season, as you can see in the photos. Ozzy thought it was great fun. We hadn't finished moving our load of firewood out of the side yard, so we had to brush it off and move it the next day, but that was okay. There wasn't really enough snow to sled (although there were some very motivated kids on the Moses Brown hill!) or stick to the streets, but it was pretty. I had coffee/tea with another Amherst alum who is also a RI transplant, and she told me that they don't actually handle the snow all that well here in RI, which was very surprising to me! Apparently, last year there was a storm during which all the schools and the area workers were dismissed at 11:00 am. Since everyone left at the same time, the traffic came to a complete stand-still, and many people (including kids) didn't get home until late at night. Therefore, numerous folks were fired (including a school superintendent). She said that when snow is predicted, many people just don't bother going in to work. So now I'm really looking forward to our first real snow day (although it better not be while Terry's out of town!) Who said that all New Englanders can handle snow?!

I have discovered that long underwear (especially silk) makes all the difference in being able to tolerate the weather here. (Not to mention gloves, hats, and scarves, but those look really silly when you are still wearing them inside.) The only problem is that the long underwear bottoms don't really seem to come in low-rise. Why is that? All my pants are low-rise. Some of them are even "super low-rise". So if my long johns are NOT low-rise, what does that mean? It means that the long john bottoms come up two inches above my pants waistband! The only way to handle this dilemma is to make sure that you either wear a very long shirt that covers this fashion faux-pas, or that you tuck your shirt in. Which is pretty uncomfortable when you already have numerous layers going on. So, if any underwear manufacturers are reading this, it would be very nice if someone would invent silk long johns with a low-rise. In petite sizes, please. :)