And now it's time for my mid-winter breakdown

It's the middle of winter now, my least favorite time of the year. The dead of winter, so to speak. Emphasis on the dead part. The holidays are long gone, except for a few stale cookies left on the kitchen counter and an infinite number of Christmas tree needles scattered about the house. It's cold and dark and I'm tired of being cold and dark. My soul seems to wither just a little bit more each time I hear the heat kick on.

I'd like to crawl into a burrow and hibernate for a couple of months like a groundhog. That might actually be a blessing for all of us as I am cranky these days. Don't tell me there's no such thing as seasonal affective disorder as I am the poster child for it. I firmly believe that at some point in our lives every single one of us could easily be diagnosed as having some kind of mental illness, and right now is my personal winter of discontent. There's an unread copy of Cormac McCarthy's utterly bleak novel The Road sitting on my bookshelf and there is no way in hell that I will even pick it up spring shows up sometime in April. I simply don't think I could stand that much postapocalyptic devastation right now. Instead, I'm going to start looking at all those seed catalogs and drool over the pretty pictures of flowers and vegetables. Right after I come out of my burrow sometime in late February, that is.