Holiday on Ice

I awoke from a scary dream this morning.

I had been at a Willie Nelson concert, and really liked a song he did about Texas. After the show Willie kindly took me for a walk so he could show me the best parts of Texas.

Eventually Willie led me out on a frozen lake. "Willie, some of this ice is pretty thin," I said, at which point big cracks started radiating out from under my feet.

Recalling some probably wrong boys' own lore, I immediately lay down on the fragile ice to spread my weight around. ( In my sleeping state, I think I had confused quicksand with frozen lakes.)

I was just getting around to figuring out how to actually wriggle my way to shore when I woke up.  Most likely because I was wriggling my way out of bed and ready to fall on the floor.

OK. Let me try to figure this dream out.

First, it's easy to explain Willie. In the hour before we went to bed, LK was reading Rolling Stone and said she was surprised to learn that Willie had written the great Patsy Cline hit "Crazy".

I was surprised, too, and I looked Willie up on Wikipedia where it confirmed that he did indeed write the song and that he was born in Texas. It also pointed out that Willie is 77 years-old. Which has nothing to do with the dream, but it will explain why Willie and Texas were rattling around my subconscious as I dozed off.

So that explains Willie. And I guess I should be grateful that I didn't hear "Crazy" over and over again my head during the dream.

But let's get to the real meat of the dream. Why, Dr Freud, did I dream I was on thin ice? After all, there really is nothing happening in my life right now where I feel like I am "on thin ice".

Well, as intriguing as it may seem to psychobabblers, some times ice is just frozen water. The simple fact is that winter has hit us very early here in upstate New York with a vengeance. Here in Pittsford, we've had quite a bit of snow, but none of the record snowfalls in Buffalo to the west and Syracuse to the east.

And it is absolutely freezing. When I finally untangled myself from the bedclothes after my nightmare, I got up this morning to discover that the temperature is 8, but with wind chill it feels like -2.

For my Aussie metric friends, 8 Fahrenheit equals -13 on the Centigrade scale, and -2 becomes -19. As Kurt and his new best friend sang last night on Glee, "Baby, it's cold outside."

Every morning I check out the Kingston Beach weather, and so far this year it has mostly been cool for the first month of summer. But sitting in an ice box makes Tassie temperatures look positively tropical. And even in our first Tasmanian winter where the temperature never visited negative numbers, I never dreamed of walking on ice.

This has all made me remember last December when we were visiting here. At the time, LK and I agreed that there were 12 months in which we could visit our families, and the three winter months were probably the worst choice warm-bloods like us could make.

Yet somehow, here we are again decking the halls and seeing our loved ones. Besides, there's an upside to all this cold weather. If we hadn't come now, I probably would never have had a chance to go for a walk with Willie Nelson.