Well, the Weather Grinch and the Internet Grinch joined forces for the past three weeks to make it impossible to make an online connection that didn’t time out before any webpage could finish loading.  (The dish on my roof didn’t even attempt to run away with the spoon.  He couldn’t access Google Maps to plan their getaway.)

We’ve been living under a solid blanket of dirty white around here.  The weather forecasters like to give it the romantic name “cloud cover.”  I don’t know about you, but when I hear the word “cloud” I get a mental image of some variation of puffy, floating, moving-on-out forms.

That’s not what we’ve got going on here.  This sky looks like one solid, smooth sheet of ice (and it’s about that color).  Whatever amount of light we have at about 6:45 in the morning is all we get all day.  It doesn’t get brighter and no sunrays break through, though it sometimes gets darker with rain showers.

Believe me, I know this is much better than several feet of snow, or floods, or temperatures so low the mercury in the thermometer takes a vacation.  But it is darn depressing.  Not to mention stressful when you can’t get online to post articles promised.  And when you can sometimes download a few email messages, but can’t get them to open before the connection fails again.

So my explanation for why there was no Transformational Editor post last week about gifts to aid a writer’s productivity has turned into this essay on the winter weather of 2014.  I’m not even going to try to open all the websites necessary to create the hyperlinks for items I wrote about in that post.  I’m just going to see if for once my internet connection will respond long enough to upload this post.

Next week, I’ll talk about my Christmas wishes for all writers, everywhere.  (Surely the sun will come out tomorrow, Annie.)  Until then, keep your snowshoes handy, your hot chocolate on the back burner, and your holiday cheer evident to all in the smile on your face.