Even after all these decades, I still despise midwestern winters. I'd already established in a previous story that a backup Watcher's facility was located in Chicago, and after one of those famous cold snaps I got to thinking about how a California girl would react to being uprooted -- the rest was easy!

My grandparents lived in southeastern Kentucky -- I remember how much excitement it raised whenever they had a dusting of snow down there, and naturally I was jealous. :-) To us it's just, "Ugh. More frakkin' snow".

Of course, I was born during a record heat wave in July, and the very next year we had record cold here in northeast Indiana -- I always wondered if that had anything to do with why I hate cold so much.