It’s been cold back home in the Midwest lately. A little too cold, if you ask the US Postal Service. It’s been more than 20 years since Seinfeld first took up the issue of whether letter carriers were really up to the task.

This weather is serious, though. Not Al Roker serious, but serious enough to prompt warnings across a wide swath of the country.

This blog is not serious. The title harkens back to a smart-alecky comment I’d make under my breath back home when it got colder than I would have liked.

“But what about global warming!?” you’re yelling at your computer screen.

I had a meteorology professor at Ball State who taught us in a climatology class that the issue isn’t “global warming.” It’s “climate change,” where extreme weather becomes more likely. But then he, a professor who described himself as a tree-hugging freak from Oregon, would give equal time and continue, “climate change is bull [expletive]. Climates change. That’s what they do.”

Temperatures have been rising steadily since we started keeping daily records about 150 years ago, he’d explain, but before that we had a mini ice-age, and we don’t have exact numbers to match up from centuries ago.

Folks from the Midwest are being bombarded with stories about how it’s colder in Chicago than Antarctica. While I was driving to work this morning, the network played a sound bite of a fella from Minnesota saying he had finally reached his limit. It doesn’t get too cold, he posited, until it’s -30.

I was once a hearty young buck like that.

Growing up in Ohio, my parents would keep the thermostat somewhere in the low to mid 60s in the winter [Sometimes, though, they’d turn it up. But only if the cat wasn’t feeling well. True story.]. We were spoiled, they’d tell us, because they grew up Connecticut [the Walking to School in Cold Weather State], where winter is for real.

When I was back at the house for Christmas, my mom, who makes a point of telling us she can still shovel her own driveway, damn it, told me Texas has spoiled me further.

She was showing me something in the yard. I told her I’d put on my coat. I joined her outside, where she was bundled up in, I swear I’m not making this up, a long sleeved shirt and no coat at all.

“It’s not that cold out here,” she said.

“It’s literally freezing,” I replied.

“Yes, but it’s right near freezing. Not in the teens or anything.”

You remember conversations well when you’re mother is making fun of you for being a weakling.