Being from Southern California, strong winds are not an entirely foreign concept to me (Hi Santa Anas! Miss you too!). October and March, in particular, stand out in my memory as being "windy" months. I am used to gusts of wind reaching some miles per hour that doesn't sound that bad until you go out and stand in it and then you're like, "Dang!" I am used to the noise that wind makes when it's blowing all crazy and the trees are like, "For Pete's sake, we're already losing our leaves because the sun is going, stop stripping what few remain!" I am used to resigning myself to ponytail hair even on the rare occasions I feel like styling it, because on the one hand we have the "wind-blown model" look that some people get, and then on the other hand we have the "I stepped through a wind tunnel and now Don King is suing me for trademark infringement" look, and I don't think I need to tell you which end of the spectrum I fall on.
But even factoring in all the years of Santa Ana winds that I have experienced back home, I was woefully unprepared for what these past couple of weeks brought in terms of wind. It would have been fine - I don't generally spend a lot of time outside, just moving from car to building, or bus to train - but I have a job (yay!), and part of that job, as I have mentioned before, entails playground supervision.
Oy.
I have gotten better at my supervising skillz - I almost always realize half of the time that the students are doing things that may potentially be not great for them in the long run, or short run if they fall, and I put a stop to it most times right away, and every other time a few seconds later.
This week added a new challenge, which was supervising the playground while looking like this:
Look, Ma, I'm an Eskimo!
With a ridiculously protruberant looking nose, thanks shadows!
You will notice I am wearing my sunglasses. It was necessary, as the sun was shining oh so brightly. Few clouds were in the sky. It should have been lovely.
It wasn't.
Why? The (censored) WIND! Oh my GOSH! I thought I knew all about Wind Chill Factor and whatnot, but experiencing it when running from house to car is totally different than recess duty for half an hour to an hour in the (censored, censored) FREEZING WIND! It's like little tiny knives that reapeatedly stab any unprotected skin, leaving it chapped and numb! It's horrible! In this picture, I am wearing a shirt, a sweatshirt, my polar jacket that's good to -45 F, a scarf, and I even put the stupid fur liner that I swore I would never wear in public, and have in fact been letting the cats use as a toy, back on my hood because I needed it. I have my jacket zipped all the way up and down, including across my face, and I was not being ironic, or goofy. I was COLD! I've been walking around the playground like this for the past three days. I am not the only one - all of us daycare workers have various means of bundling up, and we all laugh at one another, but heck, it's COLD!
Last week I hadn't yet realized the necessity of re-attaching my hood, but all it took was one twenty minute stint outside, where I ended up wrapping my scarf around my head and rockin' the hijab look. Hoods are life. The problem is, they cut off a good percentage of your peripheral vision, which means you have to swivel from side to side in order to see anything not directly in front of you. Some of the little girls had a blast with this and kept coming up being me and poking me, then ducking out of the way when I turned around. I finally stopped turning, just reached back and grabben the arm that was poking. Then I think I scared the crap out of them by intoning "Don't. Poke. Me. EVER." in my deadest, scariest voice, accompanied by lowered sunglasses and Claire's Glare (TM). Have I ever mentioned how much I loathe being poked? Poking me one of the fastest ways of taking my mood from mellow to murderous in less than two seconds. Which could be handy if you need me murderous, but only if you're not the one doing the poking. Anyway, I digress...
What kills me even more that having to do recess duty dressed like I'm starring in a re-make of Nanook of the North, is the kids. They all have jackets, and we require them to be on while the kids are playing, but you wouldn't believe how many of them try to take off their jackets while playing in (literally) sub-zero wind temperatures. They're insane! Every day I have the same argument with one of my first graders. Perhaps if she were wearing long sleeves, I'd allow her to ditch the coat. Perhaps. But she's usually wearing a tank top or short sleeved shirt, and I'm sorry, I don't care how used to the cold she is, when the wind chill factor takes the temperature below zero, you need a coat. Period.
So once again, I am grateful for family members who look out for me, from Lilas pointing out there was a sale on jackets last fall, to my Dad for buying me a very expensive but very warm jacket for my birthday, so I don't freeze. Just one more winter to get through, and then, I swear, I am moving to Texas, or Arizona, or some other ridiculously hot place where I don't have to wrap up like an Arctic explorer just to do playground duty in the fall.
