I thought for a minute that our weather had made the Drudge Report: “Fierce Winter Storm Sweeps Across Midwest.” But then it turned out to be talking about Arkansas, Michigan, western New York and Colorado.

That’s the Midwest?

Well, that’s what you get for living in a vaguely defined but easy-to-say region. If I were on the East or West Coast, or in the Pacific Northwest or Deep South, I don’t think I’d be looking up weather reports and finding out about Nebraska. But “The Midwest” seems to be comprised in journalists’ minds of the leftover bin of states. I’m surprised we didn’t get New Mexico thrown in to the mix.

Well, here where the winter wheat has been planted and the Black Angus cattle have started calving, we don’t have this storm going on, but the temperatures have turned nasty. Having been lulled into a false sense of security by a ridiculously mild winter, we don’t know whether to be relieved or not when Weather.com says that the local temperature is 9 degrees Fahrenheit, but “feels like -6.”

It’ll make the robins and squirrels go back wherever they should be in mid-February instead of cavorting about indecently as if it were April or May. (A scandal!) It’ll make the snow geese stop switching directions. (”It’s winter. It’s not winter. Dadgum it!”) It’ll make me think of having soup for every meal. It’ll make little amenities like the seat-warmer in my car seem like a profound blessing.

The storm story ended up by saying:

As the cold front moved through Wisconsin on Thursday, the state got a mix of rain, sleet, snow, lightning, thunder and high winds gusting 50 mph. Scores of motorists ended up in ditches, and Green Bay had over a foot of snow.

“It was a great system,” said Steve Davis, of the National Weather Service in Sullivan. “For meteorologists, these are extremely interesting.”

Okay, that’s just nuttiness. We need to all know what it looks like when nature wants us dead. But when it doesn’t succeed and the house is warm and the dog is asleep with her head on Greg’s leg, I think it’s okay to find it all “extremely interesting” as well.