Today's early blog has been compromised due to an inability to type while wearing mittens. This very sentence is being typed one letter at a time with the end of a pencil that is being held between my elbows, seeing as my hands need to be near my face in order to receive a small amount of warmth from my breath. Given the obvious difficulty of this task -- i.e. pencil slippage; correcting typos; the shivering -- one would think a bit of foresight could have been employed in order to avoid starting it in the first place.