Winter Blahs....

My house feels empty and void of cheer, after spending the entire day packing up my Christmas decorations and vacuuming up every last vestige of the season. Things do seem mildly more organized and distinctly less cluttered, but overall it is rather depressing.
To add to my funk, we are having a sudden and tremendous thaw outside, which for January, up north, is very odd! I noticed I could hear the cars going by the house today, as they wooshed over the wet roads which are usually frozen baths of noiseless ice. Now, I can hear water dripping from the eaves,  a sound I haven't heard since September/October. I did hear it is El Nino this year, and that alone brings sense to this phenomenon, but it still seems odd, to go from -30 one week to raining and +7 another. No wonder the pine beetles survive to destroy so many trees. The forests are ravaged here, and all because the temperature doesn't get cold enough to stave off the pine beetle.
We watch The Happening tonight, so I'm on an environmental bent. I must admit I did not expect an environmental moral to this movie...really it just seemed like a bunch of senseless gore, watching two hours of people's neurotransmitters and neural pathways being warped by some environmental hazard and then committing suicide because their "survival" mechanism had been shut off. And, to find out it was the trees' doing, and the grass's, and that the plants talk to each other, and caused it all to happen because they have no other way to stave off threats (unlike humans, who can move and run away).
Hmm...bottom line: take care of the planet! And here I am in my warm, cozy home, burning up the electricity and natural gas, thinking about what chemical I can splatter on my wall to change the colour of this room instead of how I can reduce my imprint on the environment.