When I was a kid, my friends and I played outside every minute we weren’t in school or tied up with our families. There was a huge patch of woods at the end of our street and we would have airsoft gun battles and build forts in the trees and underbrush. I remember the weather always being mild outside of the winter, which wasn’t too bad either. We rarely got snowfalls in those days as temperatures would remain in the 50s and 60s throughout the winter season. I remember growing a lot of plants in those days that I can’t have anymore because the hard freezes that we get every winter now would threaten these kinds of plants and make it extremely difficult to grow them year after year. Many cacti and succulents will die if exposed to freezing temperatures long enough to freeze the plant itself. Once it is fully thawed out again, it will most likely no longer be living at that point. These temperatures make it hard to get through the winter season without running the central furnace on a near hour by hour basis. It’s nearly always on and I have to simply deal with the expenses associated with heating my house to this degree. My elderly mother is living with my wife and my kids so I have people of every generation that need to be protected from the dangerously cold temperatures outside during our increasingly colder winter seasons. I wish we could go back to the days of my youth when the temperatures during our winters were much higher than they are today.