Winter = depressing

One of the things that took me the longest time to adjust to is the lack of winter here in Houston. Not only is the weather (usually) not much different from fall and spring but there is a total absence of it officially. At MPOW we do not have a winter semester. There is Fall, Spring, and Summer, it is as if Winter just disappeared. I just welcomed another northerner into the fold last week and I told her about our three semester system and I believe she was as bemused as I.

That's not to say that holidays like Christmas aren't celebrated, but wrapping colored lights around palm trees still seems wrong somehow. I remember heading off to the airport for my first trip home to Canada at Christmas and getting a mosquito bite loading my luggage in a friend's truck. This too seems wrong. There is a cure for this melancholy and that usually involves experiencing two weeks of Canadian winter.