“…with lows in the upper 40s” & Thoughts on Location

I can’t tell you how happy the above words made me this afternoon. I love cool weather and am so glad to be relieved of the heat even if it is only for a few days. My love of the cold probably is a reaction against thirty years in TX…or maybe its the 300 plus years that my family spent in the NE US. Whatever it is, I am glad Autumn is showing its head in Houston.  I wonder if I moved to a colder climate I would still be as fond of the cold as I am now.

In relation to this and my earlier post on Houston burnout: a good friend of mine once told me that I would be happy anywhere as long as there was a bookstore close by. She was probably right. I remember that line from Les Miserables where Hugo is describing Jean Valjean’s life as Monsieur Madeleine and he says something about how he occupied himself with books, which are “cold but constant friends” or something similar. In discussing this with friends, they all found it extremely depressing but I found it (and still do) uplifting somehow. (I did get how depressing the “books and poetry” line from “Sounds of Silence” was, which came up in the conversation as somehow related. Ah, remember the luxury and enjoyment of the wandering, impractical, pseudo-intellectual conversations of college students before real life reared its head.)