In the course of one day, from the 31st of October to the 1st of November, the weather has gone from balmy fall bliss to ice-palace cold.

What the hell?

A girl needs a period of adjustment, not just a brutal drop of temperature all in one night. My coat isn’t dry-cleaned! My heaters aren’t hooked up! I am going to freeze! Oh, but eet eezn’t zat cold, ma cherie….

True: I’ve spent the vast majority of my life living in winter wonderlands, places where on any given day in January or February, you can make your nostrils freeze together.

False: It takes many years for a person to adjust to and adapt to a tropical climate.

It took me all of about two seconds. My moving day to New Orleans was in the month of January and I was both shocked and thrilled that it was a whopping 85 degrees F (that’s a hot 30 degrees C) that day, necessitating shorts and t-shirts. I even loved the 100 degree summer days, complete with 99% humidity. Hell, I even took jobs that required me to work outside during those summer days. I was okay with the fact that my hair was to be wider than my shoulders under such conditions.

I vowed to never again live in a city that had winter.

Vows are made to be broken, but this one particularly hurts, and literally too: I forgot that being cold is actually painful. I wasn’t a fan of the canicule this summer (at least in New Orleans, air conditioning is a life-preserving necessity), but can we go back to that, please?