Oh the weather outside is frightful...

I don't know about the rest of you, but I love Winter.  Living in a sub tropical area, we don't get much of a cold spell, but those few weeks of really cold weather are something I hold out for all year long.  There's something so decadent about sitting on the couch, rugged up in your comfiest PJ's and slippers, doona wrapped around you, watching old films.

Today wasn't just cold though, oh no!  It was also raining.  What with it being cold AND wet there was only one thing I could logically do ... take to my bed like a Regency novel heroine, of course!

So I secluded myself away in my room with my laptop, snacks, pile of books and cat all readily to hand. Seriously, as long as I had a computer with wifi access and a steady supply of Diet Coke, I could probably have camped out there for the foreseeable future.

I'm not always so good about the cold though.  I remember a couple of years ago when a really cold spell hit, and I simply wasn't prepared.  That's the danger of living in a warm climate, you tend to forget that just because you'll only have a couple of weeks of cold weather, it doesn't make those weeks any LESS cold!  But you improvise.  You layer clothes when you realise you coat just isn't cutting it, you wear a doona around the house, you opt to cook something for dinner that involves using the oven because you know it'll heat the house up a bit.

She makes it look so easy!

But then when I went to get into bed, I realised that I had a new problem.  The sheets were freezing!  I could have just sucked it up, got in, and waited for them to warm but for some strange reason I had a sudden memory of an old film I'd seen once where they'd used a warming pan heated in the fireplace to heat up a bed.

Now of course I didn't have a warming pan ... or a fire to heat it in ... so being my usual impetuous self I decided to improvise.  No warming pan?  Well, a frying pan looks a little like one.  No fireplace?  But I do have a stove.  So I turned on the stove, stuck the frying pan on it, got it nice and hot, and then took it in the bedroom and rubbed it all over the sheets.

And that's when I realised that an open flame gas stove was probably not the best heating option.

The soot stains came out eventually, but it kind of defeated the purpose when I had to change the sheets, and they weren't any warmer than the first set!

I know, I'm such a martyr.