February is living up to its reputation as an impossibly long month.
Though only 28 days long, no other month packs quite as much of a punch as February.
This is especially true with weather in the northeast.
December snow is welcomed as magical while January snow is tolerated with good humor but February snow is a dreadful nuisance.
By February, kids have retreated from their sleds back to the comfort of their WiFi and public works departments are getting stingy with their salt supplies and overtime leaving progressively sloppier messes behind.
February has a greyish brown hue of dirt mixed in with snow and sand and salt dragged through the streets then frozen and thawed into an everlasting slush.
Last week alone we had three winter storms with one kind enough to stick around for two days.
Even my newspaper’s advertisers have given up on February. I appreciate “40% off a second window or door” as much as the next guy but three weeks is too long to celebrate President’s Day.
I cope with February’s perpetuity by trying to force the future. We bought all the ingredients for making my deceased Grandmother’s Irish Soda Bread but as delicious as it tastes, we’re no closer to seeing green outside our bedroom window.
Though we’re already snacking on it’s candy, Easter is still far more than a few hops away.
I delude myself by equating how much later the sun sets with spring’s impending arrival yet still every time I look out my window there’s someone ice fishing on the reservoir across the street.
Even on the day when it was 48 degrees and sunny, which seemed very reckless.
The adult and child pictured above (whom I presume to be father and son) are two of my favorites. My daughter and I watched them from the driveway this week drilling hole after hole through the ice.
They had at least a half dozen lines but kept throwing down more in a technique I can only describe as “binge fishing.”
Everything’s a binge lately.
I’m an OG binger traditionally preferring books to TV though I’m currently torn between the two.
I don’t binge as quickly I used to binge.
Put a really good book into my younger self’s hands and no matter what else was happening in my life I’d be done with it within two (generally sleepless) nights at most. Now? I’m chafing at the library’s renewal limit.
At least the library has the decency to put a clock on it so I can’t drag the game out the way I do my many other “books in progress” littering my desk and shelves.
Of course the binge I most want to indulge in is sleeping.
I’d offer my first-born child to be a binge sleeper again but that wouldn’t solve the problem cause my second-born child’s the one who keeps waking me up.
He’s also a binge pooper, which now makes me a binge diaper changer, my wife a binge milker, and his two-year-old sister a binge “helper.”
Though her idea of helping is to grab his pacifier any time he isn’t using it then run straight at him from across the room to try and jam it as far back into his throat as possible.
Our current mostly-snowed-in, waking-every-few-hours-to-feed-newborn lifestyle lends itself very well to binge watching TV.
It can be disorienting but it’s also almost soothing to know there’s always another piece of entertainment coming refreshing itself on a never-ending loop.
A TV viewing style to match the lifestyle of the longest month on earth.
My understanding is that when the sun rises in the morning, it’ll finally be March and we’ll be one step closer to this season’s finale.
Of course, with a newborn sleeping just inches from my bed, I’ll probably wake up at least two more times before then.
Next Feeding Starting In: 3… 2…. 1…
[Pre-emptive speculation that a few may email asking what I’ve been bingeing. My current show is the Kominsky Method on Netflix (you can’t go wrong with Michael Douglas and Alan Arkin and each episode is about a bottle-feeding long) and my soon-to-expire library book is Christopher Buckley’s latest satire: Make Russia Great Again. Jenny is deep into the Netflix show The Crown while also reading Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms.]
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