Note to rain: This is Idaho, not Seattle

You'd never know it by looking outside, but it's January 6. The sky should be bright as blue topaz, the ground should be blindingly white and crunchy underfoot, the streets should be slick as snot, with cars spinning their wheels as they take off from the stop sign across the street from my window. The thermometer should read 16 or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, the humidity is so high it's falling from the sky. I think they call that rain in some parts of the world. It's a sweltering 43 degrees out. The ground is a sickly, gooey brown with splotches of green here and there where grass forgot to go dormant for the winter. The streets are strewn with pebbles from when they "sanded" (they use gravel, not sand) the roads a month or two ago. There isn't a speck of snow to be found, save perhaps the mountaintops in Montana, which I can't see today thanks to the humidity. Winter is supposed to be pretty - all whites and blues and crispy. Instead, it's ugly outside. Wet, and dank and soggy and brown and gray and definitely not crispy. I think God's forgotten his geography (much like I do when I try to remember whether Minnesota is east or west of Wisconsin) and included the panhandle of Idaho in his Pacific Northwest weather instructions. Yuck.