This is how winter should be.

That's right, you heard me.

You call it a "polar vortex," I call it "a regular god damn Canadian winter."

We've been spoiled, us southern-Ontarians, with some pansy-ass winters in the past decade. Is this directly related to my habit of leaving my car idling in the staff parking lot while I'm at work all day, and my hobby of burning vast quantities of Styrofoam out on the Leslie Street Spit, twice weekly? Perhaps.

You want a bullshit winter? Take the one we had a couple of years ago. A little below freezing, a little above freezing. Dancing around the zero-mark like friggin' Fred Astaire after a baker's-dozen Pomtinis. Snow? Barely any, then it's a grey, slushy, stupid mess. Then you get a little more, and it sort-of melts again. Lather, rinse, repeat, blow out brains.

But this... this is what January should be like. It was twenty-three-below if it was a degree this morning, I tell you. Had to dodge a wooly mammoth on St. Clair Avenue on the way into work. Potholes the size of football* fields. Children freezing into solid blocks of ice on their way to school. In short, it's the best winter we've had in a good long while.

The rest of our Home on Native Land makes fun of us, and rightly so, for being wusses about the cold. "Cold?", a Winnipegger might ask. "You call this cold? Why, we'd be out in our flip-flops in this."

...except Vancouver. They can go suck an egg, far as I'm concerned. (Enjoy those 60.2 hours of January sunshine on average, losers.)

In conclusion, there are 24 days until the Tigers' pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training.
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* Canadian ones, no less.