Warm is Good

The snow is gone and soon the mud will be too.  It's always too hot in my school.  The thermostats in the classrooms are invariably turned up to maximum heat.  I am the sneaky culprit lurking about turning them down.  I can do it with a flick of a finger without being noticed.  When colleagues come into my room, rubbing their arms and whining about it not being steamy hot, I give them a stock comment like, don't you know there are polar bears drowning in the arctic?... or that's why God gave us wool.  I rarely see anyone wearing wool around here, maybe some farm people, but they mostly wear fleece vests under Carhartts, that sort of thing.  That's okay, I remain a wool snob.  Wool is the Mother of All Fibers.  It's light and airy, it breathes, it's flame retardant, water retardant, and insulates beautifully.  It doesn't cook you like alpaca and is cheap and plentiful.  It's a wool night here on the farm.  I am the first one home which means I have to greet the crazy psycho dogs hell-bent on getting outside after being locked in all day, navigate through yowling cats determined to trip me as I haul in my packages,  light the fire - or turn on the electric baseboard heating (refer to aforesaid comment about polar bears) - clean up the doggies messes,  check Facebook (not allowed in school), get the dogs back inside, figure out what to make for dinner, get coffee going, etc.  I often wait before going out into the barn to the sheep.  There is a whole different set of greetings and demands aimed at me in that direction.  The weather is changing from the unseasonably warmish days we've had back to more cold again.  I won't have mud splashings on my trousers now.   I confess I would much rather drive the 50 miles back and forth from school in this weather instead of crawling through blizzards and white outs.  With all the sick days I've saved up I might stay home with my sheep when that happens.  Home is the best place - and home on the farm is even better.