Winter is finally upon us, with temperatures this weekend dropping to windy low twenties. Which, as I’m reminded every year, is actually very, very cold. Especially if you’re a total pansy who grew up in temperate Northern California.

Indeed, fair Palo Alto prepared me little for life in this city, where each year swings from icily frostbitten January to steamy, sweltering August, and back again. Oddly enough, even the temperature of water out of New York faucets is far more extreme – the hot literally scalding, the cold glacially chilled from miles of subterranean, sub-subway travels. It’s something I remember from my many visits while growing up, and something I painfully relearned in my last apartment, where the shower spray swiftly and continuously swung each morning forty degrees in one direction and then the other.

Fortunately, the shower in my current apartment is rather more stable. But Jess, who may be made of asbestos, tends to leave all faucets cranked to their steaming peak heats. That isn’t all bad, though: boiling water averaged against bitter outdoor freeze apparently leaves me somewhere near that Palo Alto middle ground my wimpy senses still seem to expect.