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…but I can’t help being amazed that this time last year, no moment of my life was spent without long johns on. Day or night, inside or outside, awake or asleep, I wore thermal underwear under my pants. Seriously, Lowestoft, England was COLD during the month of January. The kicker of it is, this January Lowestoft is even COLDER. In fact, our British friends are enduring their coldest winter since 1981. On Friday, when I checked their weather forecast, the temperature was six degrees below freezing, and the image above was what I saw on a webcam shot of their seafront. A second webcam wasn’t viewable—it was covered with ice.

Here is a photo from another area of Suffolk, the region in which Lowestoft falls:

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The boys like this one because it has trains. I like it because it reminds me of our winter travels throughout Europe—where the temperatures were even lower and the snow even deeper. And here are two Suffolk photos my boys especially like because of the donkeys and the squirrel:

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The prettiness of these images aside, I do believe that, were we still living in Lowestoft, I would die.

I’ve grown up in San Diego. Almost four decades of warm weather year round have rendered me irrevocably wimpy when it comes to weather. Long stretches of rain, sleet, snow, and freezing temperatures . . . they would be more than I could endure. I was okay about their comparatively milder winter last year because I was psyched up for it and because I truly wanted to know what daily life in cold weather was like. Now I know. And with all my heart, I’m happy to once again be sweating through January, wearing shorts while chasing boys on bikes through a 78º park under a sun hot enough to sunburn one of the boys’ arms.

Honestly, I’m not trying to gloat.

But, man, San Diego winters are heaven on Earth.

Summer at the park

*photos of donkeys, trains, & squirrel from www.bbc.co.uk.