Why Don't We Learn From the Bears?

Seriously people, I think bears are really on to something with this hibernate-through-winter thing. Wouldn't it be great if, say, shortly after Thanksgiving we all retreated to our warm and comfortable, albeit musty, caves and curled up next to our loved ones not waking up again til the middle of April? What would we really be missing out on anyway? Christmas? Overrated. New Year's Eve? Such a bore. President's Day? Please. We could pig out all summer, go to bed fat and wake up thin and ready to party. What more could a little old person ask for?

As you can see from these photographs winter has already come to Berlin pretty much full force. I will always have way too much California/Arizona in my soul to think much of this season. As a child, I spent many a Christmas Eve swimming outside when we went to visit my grandparents in Phoenix over the holidays. In my East Bay adolescence/young adulthood we would talk each year about maybe going up to "visit" the snow. "Hey, why don't we drive to the Sierra Nevadas say "hi snow!" and then drive back home?" Sounds good. Little old East Bay me just has no need for it covering the courtyard of her apartment building....

I finally broke down and bought a pair of imitation Uggs today. Uggs stands most definitely for god-awful-ugly, but the darn things are pretty warm and I decided warm, un-stylish feet are better than stylish, numb blocks of ice posing as feet. Still, winter does have some highlights like Glühwein and taking the girls to Hasenheide for sledding. They say this winter is supposed to be the worst one in a 1000 years (go German optimism!!) so we should have plenty of frosty-building fun....

When the sun actually shines it's also not that bad. It finally did on Sunday and I took a little jaunt with Baby Li through the graveyard on Zossenerstrasse Ecke Blücherstrasse which is about a five minute walk from our apartment. Several famous people are buried there including Felix Mendelson and Fanny Hensel. So many art deco crypts and sculpture of weeping angels and Victorian wrought-iron fences that are deliciously decrepit and run-down. I had fun taking some ghostly self-portraits in the glass door of the old crypt below.

Yes, when the sun shines winter is bearable, but in Berlin it rarely ever does. Today it's back to leaden gray skies and darkness like when Sam and Frodo got too close to Mordor. The weather forecast says it should stay this way for a while. Nice. April is how many months away? Crap. I shouldn't even start having such thoughts. No matter what anyone ever says, no matter how excited people get about skiing or snowshoeing or freezing their asses off for some unknown jolly reason, this is my two cents:

Winter is for the birds!!