Every year in Mazatlan, as what passes for winter rolls around, it never fails to amuse me to near my friends and family complaining about the bitter cold. Riding in an open air taxi on a beautiful February night, they are hiding their hands in their sleeves and shivering loudly. If it were any colder, they might think about investing in a jean jacket. They don´t know what cold is! I wonder how they would fair in Edmonton, Alberta, where I spent seven long, dark winters. Up there, you start the day with a broom and shovel, searching the snowdrifts for the lump that is your car while your scarf freezes to your chapped stinging face. Looking back, I can´t imagine how I withstood such a vicious climate, but, like so many of life´s hardships, you just get used to it. As long as you dress like your going for a walk on the moon, you don´t quite die. Our cat lost an ear to frostbite, but I never heard him complain about the cold. Actually, the coldest I ever got was in the heart of my fourteenth summer. my parents shipped me off to mountaineering camp in the Rockies, though I knew nothing about mountaineering. In retrospect, I suspect that their thinking may have been that I would come back corrigible or not at all. Upon climbing our first peak, as we lay gasping for oxygen at the summit, our guide proceeded to unstrap both of his legs from the knees down. He had lost them to frostbite some years before, but you didn´t hear him complain about the cold. The rest of us did though, as we stumbled (glissaded) down glaciered valleys with towering ice cliffs collapsing and avalanching overhead, weaving through crevices and crevasses, shaking with cold and terror. I felt like Sam McGee, the legendary Klondiker whose dying frozen wish was to be cremated and go to the devil, where at least he would be warm again. Actually when your bones finally do thaw out, it is not a joyful flooding warmth you experience, but rather an arthritic agony that makes an ice cream headache seem fleeting and mild. When I moved to Seattle in mid-winter, it seemed like a tropical paradise after Canada. Nobody in Seattle owns a