Cabin fever and a few rants

It's been deadening cold for days and days up here, and it's really getting on my nerves, much as I like the cold weather. I'm tired of having to pile on so many layers of clothes, I can barely see through my scarves or bend my arms and legs. I'm starting to get a touch of the strange form of Seasonal Affective Disorder that plagued me when I was a kid: after Christmas, when we'd start taking down the ornaments and lights and such, I'd start getting anxious and restless. When I was seven, I suffered from terrible bizarre dreams that used to leave me unable to fall asleep, or which would wake me up at ridiculously early hours of the morning, unable to get back to sleep. I can remember some of these dreams even to this day, though they certainly don't phase me in the least now. I'm not having nightmares, or the one or two times that I did recently, I utilized some techniques I learned from an article on lucid dreaming by Deepak Chopra. Besides reminding yourself that it *is* a dream, you get ahold of the situation... sometimes I feel like I can handle threats in the Dreaming better than I can in the real world. But there again, considering some of the things in the news, it's been enough to make me want to retreat into my skull for a while:

( Here be rants about things in the news, local and otherwise )