Tips for Florida people in cold places...

I meant to blog about this awhile ago, and although it is already spring and no longer relevant (it was 80 degrees today!), it will become relevant again in another 9 months or so.

The following tips may seem obvious to people who are from the North (and by North, I mean anyplace north of Georgia), but to someone who grew up in Florida and never experienced a true winter, these tips are not at all intuitive. Each of these tips were developed from my first-hand experience. Which basically means I did something dumb first, and then realized how dumb it was immediately afterward.

1) Buy gloves that are NOT made of a water-permeable material. As it turns out, snow is actually frozen water. If you wear gloves that are made of wool for example, the water will melt, and then seep through the wool, ending up on your formerly warm hand. This is particularly important if you plan on having a snowball fight and want to maintain sensation in your hand.

2) Keep ice-removal equipment outside of car. Keeping it inside the car seems like a good idea because then it will always be near the place where you need it most. Until the car door ices over and you have to just sort of beat the ice with your fist in your water-permeable gloves, with usually no success, all the while the ice pick is mocking you and staring you down from inside the car. There is nothing like being humiliated by an ice pick.

3) Wake up extremely early to make sure you have time to remove snow/ice from car. Snow is not discriminatory. It blankets everything.

4) Turn on heat only after the temperature gauge moves. The temperature gauge is not there for shits and giggles. Use it wisely to precisely time when to turn on the heat on a cold winter's day. Otherwise you will freeze...to...DEATH!

5) Do not wear shoes that are made of water permeable material in the snow. In tip #1, replace "hand" with "foot". And "gloves" with "shoes". Feet may seem smelly and funny-looking, but without them, walking is quite difficult.

6) Park the car in a spot that will be sunny in the morning. In the battle against the merciless and cold-hearted snow, the sun is a powerful ally. Snow is powerless to resist the sun's ultraviolet beams of warmth. If you follow this tip, you could possibly avoid tip #3.

If anyone else has helpful tips, feel free to add them in the Comments section!