February in Pittsburgh

I once lived in a Holiday Inn in Pittsburgh for almost a month.

It was one of our first experiments in homeschool travel. It was our first year homeschooling our kids, and we'd bought lessons from a private school rather than try to create our own. The power plant that employs my husband was building a new unit with technology that was new to them. A company in Pittsburgh had such a unit, so the company sent personnel out to Pennsylvania to take classes and observe. My husband had already spent a week there months earlier. They didn't have the guys room together in standard rooms, but booked each man into a mini suite, with a refrigerator, microwave and sleeper sofa. When they sent him out a second time, for much longer, I thought: I'm self employed, and the kids can do their schoolwork anywhere. So, we bought plane tickets to go join Dad for the month.

My son, daughter and I flew out several days after my husband left. All I had was an address and a MapQuest set of directions to get me from the airport to my destination. We landed at about 5:00 p.m. I had neglected to take into account the fact that I was going night blind, and I'd be driving in the dark. In a rental car. On unfamiliar roads. In a snow storm. I warned my 12 year old and 8 year old - "Do not talk to me. Do not make any noise. Do not annoy each other." It speaks of either their consideration or of their terror of dying a fiery death that there wasn't a peep out of them for the entire 45 minute drive.

I don't recall much in the way of signs of civilization on the highway while driving toward the city. I did go through several unmanned toll booths, stressing out that I had run out of change by the last one. ("Which route did you take?" my husband asked. "I don't remember any toll booths." "I don't know! I just drove where the computer told me to.")

I will never forget my first look at the city. I'd been driving through dark, rural areas when I hit a tunnel. I drove along, not thinking much of it. When I came out the other side, it was the visual equivalent of being in a quiet, dark theater, then having the entire orchestra simultaneously play a crescendo. WAAAHHH! There was the skyline, bright and glittering, and very close, just across the river. It was beautiful and disorienting. I wanted to stop, look, maybe take photos, but I couldn't.

After taking my turn and eventually finding myself in a quieter area, I crawled down a snow covered road, following the instructions I had. I phoned my husband on the cell phone: "Are you in a Holiday Inn?"

"Yep."

"I'm in the parking lot."

This is what the view from our window looked like on most days:

The little red car on the right is our rental, Red.

My mother had always told me that we desert dwellers didn't really understand cold, didn't know what humidity does to the cold. I dismissed that thought. We lived less than an hour from the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, for goodness sake. We understood cold! We laughed at wimpy California transplants who couldn't take it.

Then I experienced Pennsylvania in February.

OH. MY. We were now the wimps, running from heated buildings to the heated car as fast as we could. There was no sledding, no hiking, and very little outdoor photography. We did something we hardly ever do - took photos through windows.

We'd never experienced an ice storm, where rain falls as liquid, but freezes as soon as it touches anything solid.

We had to chip our way into our car. I'd never seen anything like it.

Mostly, we settled into a comfortable rhythm. In the morning, the kids and I headed out to explore while their dad went to work. We visited almost every museum and historic site in a 45 mile radius. Then, we'd head back to the hotel to do schoolwork in the afternoon, and maybe swim in the indoor, heated pool. When Dan came home, we'd have dinner, then settle in to watch TV or head out to shop or play indoors. On weekends, Dan joined us while we explored yet more museums and historic sites.

We're museum groupies; we were in heaven.

It was so cold that the zoo moved a large number of the animals indoors - the elephants, apes, reptiles, anything not equipped to deal with the cold. Yes, those are lions, African beasts, still outside in the snow.

We explored Fort Pitt, the aviary, the parks, and spent more time than we normally would have at the mall.

We discovered that Pennsylvanians were used to indoor recreation in the winter. In the mall there were indoor playgrounds and mini golf.

Everything looked so different than it does at home; the stone buildings older than my state, the row houses, the ice, the piles of salt spread across the road.

This isn't even a creek or waterfall, it's just an ordinary hillside along the road. That much water habitually weeping out of the ground is profoundly foreign to desert folk.

This is apparently one of the iconic shots of Pittsburgh. We saw postcards and posters taken from this same spot, only in the summertime.

We ate often at the Ponderosa Steak House. We liked the food, and it was amusing that we lived, at home, less than an hour away from the actual site of the Ponderosa Ranch, but we didn't have any of the chain restaurants named after it. Plus, they had Family Nights with free balloons and face painting.

I am not prone to homesickness, but I started being more excited than usual to see places that reminded me of home on TV. Even the California coast looked like "home," its being a familiar place (and only a few hours drive from our house.) Still, our first foray into "travel schooling" proved to be a resounding success.

We're all agreed that one day, though, we need to go back to Pittsburgh - in warmer weather.

In Sickness and in Health

Ah, illness. There you are. I know you must have missed me, but I really didn't miss you.

If I could, I would sleep through any illness in its entirety. We'd figure out some way for my family to slap patches on me that would enable me to absorb medication and nutrients through my skin, and I'd just sleep until the illness was gone. Doesn't that sound good?

There are apparently some really nasty illnesses going around right now. My husband has been sicker than I've ever seen him, and I've known him since he was 22. He doesn't usually get sick. On the rare occasions that he does, it isn't very severe and goes away quickly.

Once, he was uncharacteristically feverish and miserable. I know how that feels, and I know that he likes to be fussed over, so I made him tea, brought him blankets and medicine, and cooed over him. He fell asleep, slept all night, and woke up feeling fit as a fiddle.

"Wow, that virus really kicked my butt," he said.

While happy that he felt better, I was also outraged. "NO! It did NOT! It CANNOT be a butt-kicking if it lasts all of 4 hours!"

He was puzzled. "But it was a miserable 4 hours."

"I don't care! That's not a butt-kicking! That barely qualifies as sick! That's just… mutant! You're a mutant."

In the last 6 weeks or so, though, he's gone from strep to bronchitis and back to strep. The bronchitis really did kick his butt; he was barely functional for a week. That's par for the course with me, but it's unheard of for him. He has never had active, misery inducing symptoms for that long.

I did everything I could to roll up the welcome mat and hang a "no vacancy" sign, but the bronchitis moved into my lungs anyway. Aside from the growly voice it gives me, there's nothing good about this. Well, except for the huge, horse pill-looking antibiotics that I'm on. Those are pretty good. Yay for modern medicine.

Now, it's about getting enough sleep and keeping warm.

Years ago, when my husband and I were first living together and figuring out how the other person ticked, he came home from work when I was sick to find me wrapped in a quilt on the couch. That's pretty standard when I'm sick. He'd barely closed the door when he said, "It's stifling in here," took off his shirt, and turned the ceiling fan on high. I made a noise like a Bloom County cartoon – "AIEEEE!"

"Are you trying to kill me? I'm SICK!"

"I know, but it's hot in here. I'm just trying to get the air moving."

"It's an arctic wind, blowing right on me!"

I unwound my quilt and scrabbled down the hall to the bedroom, griping the whole way, and cocooned in more layers of bedding. In the living room, Dan was opening a window.

"Don't do that! It's cold out there!"

"It's like 80 degrees in here! You're going to melt me!"

I generally can't stand the sensation of wind, at all, and that's when I'm not sick. I can't sleep if I'm breathing on my own arm; I have to pull at least the sheet over it. If my husband is literally breathing down my neck (or on my arms or worse, into my face) in bed, I can't sleep; I shove him over to the other side of the bed. Dan would like to sleep with a fan on. I've tried, and I just can't do it.

A few years ago, he again came home to me sick on the couch, wearing sweats and thick socks, curled into a fetal position under a down quilt."Awww," he said, and snaked his hand up the covers and up the pant leg to rub my calf. He was shocked when my skin felt chilled to the touch. "You're cold!" he said.

"Of course I'm cold. I'm sick. Why do you think I'm sitting here like this?"

He had to check the rest of me to see if the calf was an anomaly, so he reached under my shirt to feel my tummy, which was also cold to the touch. "How is that physically possible?" he demanded. "How can you be cold underneath all that?"

"I don't know. Gimme back my covers." I tucked the comforter back around me tightly. I never bother anymore to think about how it's possible to be cold, because I obviously am. The best I can guess is that my body is so busy fighting the illness that it has no energy left to generate heat. This would also explain why I get sick if I'm out in the cold for too long – in order to try and keep me warm, my body diverts all its energy there, and I have nothing left to fight off any germs. Whether that's accurate or not, the fact remains that cold often makes me sick, and illness further damages my ability to make my own heat.

This is part of our deep seated temperature incompatibility, my husband's and mine. He is always hot. Always. And he stubbornly refuses to wear shorts because he doesn't think he looks good in them, which is maddening in so many ways. It'll be summer, I'll be in shorts or capris and a short sleeved shirt and he'll be in jeans and, frequently, a long sleeved shirt, and he'll crank up the evaporative cooler. "Quit blowing cold air on my bare skin and take something off!" I'll gripe.

I have sat in chairs he's recently vacated and been overheated just by the residual body heat. He's like a furnace.

I, on the other hand, have a standard body temperature of about 97 degrees. I get cold easily. I can't tell you how often I've had to get out of bed to put on a pair of socks because my feet are too cold for me to sleep. I can't let them touch each other or any other part of me when they're that way; instead of body contact warming them up, it causes whatever they touch to get colder. When I'm sick, I feel unreasonably cold, all the time. I cannot sleep when I'm cold.

When our family made a visit once to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, we stood in front of a screen that showed heat signatures. The warmer something was, the more it glowed green. My husband and middle daughter were bright green apparitions, chuckling over the fact that some body parts, like armpits, glowed even brighter. My oldest daughter and I couldn't see ourselves, and everyone was starting to wonder if we were somehow standing outside the view of the sensors. Then, we moved directly between the rest of our family and the sensors, and finally showed up - as black, body shaped voids in front of their glowing greenness. "I can't believe you're so cold you don't even show up! That's wierd!" Middle Daughter said. "Welcome to our world," I said.

Our bedroom is unheated (long story), which is great for Dan. Most people sleep better in a cool room, but I can't do it. I sleep with a comforter in the summer. In the winter, I have layers and layers on the bed. (Dan frequently sleeps without covers, even in the winter.)

The old upper crust custom of separate bedrooms makes a bit more sense to me now than it did when I was a kid.

Dan bought me a heated mattress pad, which is one of my favorite birthday gifts ever. It says not to sleep with it on (or you risk burning yourself), but I can see no other reason for its existence.

The first time I got sick after he bought it, Dan encouraged me to go to bed in my thick sweats and socks and turn the bed heater on. I did – I couldn't feel the heater at all. He didn't believe me until he did the hand-against-bare-skin test again and discovered that my skin still felt positively refrigerated. The thick clothes kept the heat from getting through. This made no sense to Dan – for him, staying warm is about holding body heat in. For me, it's about getting outside heat. With the sweats on, I needed the heater at a 9 before I could feel anything. With bare legs, a 2 or 3 felt toasty.

Even better, I bought a new comforter that's so warm I rarely need the bed heater. When I was a kid, we had quilts that were cotton exterior and cotton batting – those things weighed a ton. I loved them. We also had down and feather mix filled quilts that were so heavy and warm. Our sleeping bags were canvas with cotton batting and flannel lining. Newfangled nylon things with polyester fluff just never felt as warm, until I got this comforter. Back in the day, we called this filling "polyester fiberfill," but my new comforter touts it as, "hypoallergenic down alternative." Well, la-di-dah. Still, it's so warm that I occasionally overheat and have to peel it back.

I sense signs that I will feel human again soon. I did some laundry – yay! – and minor straightening. Then I had a nap. Naps are magic.

So, we're in for a ride, illness and me, but one day it will be forced to give up and go away. Until then I will commune with my non allergenic comforter and my orange juice. Good night.