I walked out the door today in just my hoody (well, not just my hoody. I had on my work clothes too) and felt a bit stunned by the quality of the air out there.

Have you ever taken a drink of something... say milk... but for whatever reason were expecting lemonade? When the wrong taste and texture hits your tongue, there is this moment where you taste nothing at all. Your brain is confused. You told it to expect lemonade, and all the sweetness receptors were ready to go, but the... milkness receptors were asleep. They'd been given the drink off. And so... for that first sip, you tasted nothing.

This is what happened to my skin today... my hands and face... my neck... when I first walked out the door. The air hit me and I felt no temperature at all. I felt only confusion.

I was expecting warm, mild air. Afterall, it was so sunny out! The past four days had been grey and rainy, but they were also quite warm... up in the 50s F. Why would this sunny Wednesday be any different?

Back on Saturday, after having waken to the crash of thunder, and the rush of rain, I'd actually unplugged the electric blanket, folded it up, and put it away for another year. Sunday I checked the spot where the Daffodils come up every spring and sure enough! There were the little green sprouts poking out of the muddy earth by the stoop.

So here it was, Wednesday morning... me in my hoody, walking toward the car... and it took three or four steps before my brain reported back that, "Yeah... it's like 20 degrees out here, Pat."

I was like, "Nah. Brain, you're over-reacting." I stepped onto the wet spot by the car door... the puddle that always forms after a rain, because my landlord is too cheep to re-pave the parking lot. But instead of a little splash sound followed by ripples radiating outward from the sole of my shoe...

...I slipped.

It was one of those really awkward slips. The kind you only do when you're not expecting to slip at all... the kind where your whole body jerks and you suddenly find yourself all crouched and flailing your arms going, "Ngya..t tha fuck!"

And a slip like that is never complete without somebody walking by to see it. In this case it was some Asian neighbor guy. He didn't react much, but he saw me. I guess I should count my lucky stars there weren't three teenage girls walking past on their way to school at that moment. If that had been the case, I'd surely have fallen on my ass.

I'd have been imortalized in their memory as that guy who fell on his ass, and went on to be sighted several times the following summer, smoking on his front stoop, sitting on an inflatable donut pillow, whining to people on the phone about his tailbone.

So thank you, Asian guy... for sparing me that fate.

I tossed my lunch onto the passenger seat and then with great sorrow... and great caution... walked back to the flat to get my winter coat and gloves.

As it pertains to romance, I guess the lesson here is that we often imagine things are more stable and lovely than they actually are... especially in the early days of a relationship.

That's not to say one should be overly paranoid, or overly pessumistic. Afterall, those daffodils will bloom. Eventually, spring will take hold. One simply needs patience... and a bit of realism on those chilly days in March.