It is cold outside. It is also cold inside. Our house was clearly not designed for an 8 degree morning. Mom says there is only a little insulation in the attic and none in the side walls. When the house was built, the hot summers were more of a concern than the possibility of a cold winter. The skirting around the post and piers under the house, was on a sharp angle that joined the sidewalls a foot above the floor. This created a ductwork up the walls to the attic and open to the ground under the house. In summer the floors and baseboards would be cool. In winter they are just plain cold. This week, I’m surprised there isn’t ice on the floors! Mom may have insulated the baseboards and straightened that skirting, but it clearly wasn’t enough. My feet get cold unless Mom holds me all of the time. She doesn’t seem to want to do that.

Mom and Dad had also replaced the old rotted wood framed windows. The single pane of glass there was wavy and had funny bumps in it. The new windows are much nicer, but this week Mom insists on keeping the drapes covering the windows. She says there are still drafts around the window trim. She and I argue, because I want to see out even if I’m not sure I want to go out.

All of this means that I want to spend a lot of time laying in front of the gas fireplaces. I have to share those spots with Missy and Sophia. I don’t mind doing that, but Mom stops to stand there as well. She blocks the heat! It is expected to get above freezing during the day tomorrow, but still be below at night. I’m ready for this to end. Stay tuned.

Mom gets emails about the Publisher’s Clearing House Prizes. One today was for their Search contests. They offer her silly things to search for, but she always wants to come up for her own ideas. Sometimes it is for things she cares about like her friend Gerry Eugene and his books. Other times it involves things she has seen on Facebook. She has threatened to keep a log of things she sees and then goes to Amazon to search. She knows that that search will have those items pop up on her Facebook, but I digress.

Today her search was for me! She did add “the cat” so I would not be confused with the role James Garner played in Murphy’s Romance. I was shocked that she found my blog! I am almost famous! Thank you, Mom.

Mom talks about the weather a lot. There are days when she say she won’t let us go outside on our leads, although she still takes the silly dog out. There have been days recently where you could hardly see her under the layers of clothes as she headed out the door. She often tells people that here in our area of Texas, we have Seattle winters. She usually means 40 degrees for the high and 40 degrees for the low. Winter is also when both locations get most of our rain. Seattle gets days and days of drizzle. Here we normally get hard downpours, but not always. Today is a gray day with drizzle. I’ll bet this means she will wear her rubber boots because the back yard becomes a pond, and she’ll make me stay inside. At least the Seattle 40 at night is right for the forecast; I miss the sunshine on the window seat. Gray is just not my color.