Every morning since I've been back from tropical South America - more than a week ago - I look out the window and see that the snowman is still there, proudly sticking out its sticky little arms and blank face pointing into the sun.

I loathe him.

I flew off to Brazil in late february.  When I left Riga it was quite mild - just under zero degrees - and I departed safe in the knowledge that when I returned it would be March already, and winter would be at an end, and there would be hope and a bit of warmth in the air. I didn't expect 25 degrees and a warm wind.  I would have been happy with 1 degree and slowly melting ice and snow.

Turns out, the week before I arrived back home, there was some snow.  And Mikus got busy and built this tiny little snowman in the backyard. Now, snowmen are usually a short-lived thing.  You can only build them when things are relatively warm (around zero degrees), because at that temp the snow is good and sticky.  You often wake up the next day to find your snowman melting, or already in a puddle on the ground, because things have warmed up overnight.

But not this snowman.  Oh, no.  THIS snowman has been beautifully preserved by the fact that the temps dropped down, down, down.  The closer I got to Riga, the colder it got.  I've been home for over a week now and we are still enjoying super-duper-don't-go-outside-you'll-turn-into-an-icicle temps.  The wind chill factor is minus a million and our pellet heating system is eating pellets like there's no tommorrow.

I that is why I HATE THAT SNOWMAN!