Dog's breath

My life in Greece has included what I consider to be mild winters. Not that it was never cold wherever we happened to be living, but it wasn’t usually sub-freezing, witch’s tittie cold. Sure, we had snow, but it never really felt that cold. In fact, I am almost sure that I never encountered temperatures low enough to make my breath visible – until this winter. It doesn’t help that our little mountain village seems to invite frostier temperatures than the city by the sea – even in the four miles between Panorama and our home the thermometer can drop as much as five degrees Celsius, which can sometimes be the difference between cold and losing feeling in your extremities cold – but I think even Thessaloniki proper has been colder than normal, or at least colder than the two previous winters I’ve spent here. We’ve had honest to goodness, stick to everything snow here four times, which surpasses the one or two crappy snowfalls I’ve seen (ok, we did have a really good snow when we lived in Litochoro, but only one), but when we tell city folk we are snowed in, they inform us it is only raining where they are.

I’ve always been one of those people who is too hot (in fact I think my first words involved a complaint about the heat), but here in our new house I find myself constantly freezing (even with our heat set to an over generous 21 degrees Celsius – sorry environment). Every once in awhile even my husband is cold (and he shares my overheated sensibilities), but usually he is sweating while I am still chilled to the bone. It is getting a bit tiresome, because sometimes even a nice blanket and a couple of cats can’t warm me up fast enough, and honestly, for someone with a rheumatoid illness being cold all the time does not help with joint pain one little bit. But the pain isn’t really the issue – the problem is that I have actually become one of those people I used to mock, those perpetually frozen, shawl bound people that constantly complain about the temperature. This behavior must stop, and so for the first time I find myself longing for the summer when I can swelter miserably in an air conditioner-less house, and the breath of the neighborhood dogs no longer bursts forth in strong foggy puffs when they bark.