To quote the great Christian Bale: winter and I are done professionally.

It's Tuesday morning, February 9. Outside, it has snowed for something like 36 hours, and tonight the wind is supposed to huff and puff and blow the snow around. Add this to a winter that's already brought us four weeks of nonstop, sub-zero temperatures, an ice storm and a lifetime supply of gray clouds that linger long enough that I've often forgotten what the sun even looks like.

Meanwhile, Vancouver, British Columbia, home of the upcoming Winter Olympics, has had a mild winter, with temperatures hanging around the 50-degree mark. Excuse me if I don't feel sorry that they've had to haul truckloads of snow in to make sure the athletes have enough to compete on.

I will offer apologies if I'm coming off short-tempered, though I'm sure everyone else around Iowa's starting to feel the same way. It seems we've had too few halfway decent days to reassure us that we'll get any kind of relief. Still, the days are (slowly) getting longer, and we are approaching February's halfway point. I suppose that's something.

And it's not like we've exactly been alone. Washington, D.C. had a couple of feet of snow dropped on it over the weekend, and was expecting another pounding earlier this week. I have a friend who works in D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty's office who compared the city's plight to the Battle of Stalingrad, which stretched from the summer of 1942 into the bitter Soviet winter of early 1943. Of course he exaggerates, but this winter has long since acquired that drawn-out, tedious misery usually associated with sieges.

For as long as I can remember, my life goals for myself have involved moving south and putting as much distance between myself and the seasons as I possibly can, but there really seems to be no escape in the Continental U.S. So, my dreams of a owning an antebellum plantation house are starting to be supplanted by living on a boat.

Surely, it wouldn't be impossible to find a (reasonably) affordable 30-year-old yacht that I can refurbish and take to the seas with. Hoist a couple of flags at her stern, give her a name and I could simply raise anchor any time that snow or chill threatened to hit my current port of call.

Blue water, vast beaches, soft breezes as the sun goes down as a fiery ball...I have to hang onto these sorts of images. They definitely beat the sight of the "Stop Here On Red" sign about to be obscured from view from my office desk by a growing pile of snow.