I personally vowed not to be one of those people at the Inauguration wearing two coats, four layers of outerwear and longjohns on top of my normal underthings. Add to that scarves, gloves, hats, earmuffs and snowboots and most of my family was wearing their own body weight in clothes. I tried to imagine myself in all that stuff, waddling around Washington, barely able to squeeze through the doors of our charter bus. No, I figured a little common sense would serve me better than an 8-inch layer of clothes would. So with two pairs of socks, a pair of girls’ cotton pants under my pants and two sweaters under my leather jacket, I was good to go. I searched all over our small southern county for those hand warmers you put into your gloves and shoes to keep you warm. After having no luck on a wet January Sunday, I figured I’d go with the next best thing—air activated Thermacare-type heat packs like the kind you use for backaches. Bingo! And even more, they weren’t just for my hands and feet, they protected my chest and throat from the cold, too.

The first thing to know about staying warm is that your body is already warm, you just have to keep it that way. I always start from the inside out–at every rest stop we took, I had a coffee, cocoa, hot tea, *something* hot to drink. I wasn’t alone in that thought—I couldn’t even see the end of the line for Starbucks at the Federal Center Metro Station. Ah, but a safety net—there was a Potbelly’s next door selling hot chicken noodle soup. Did they read my mind or what??

As the day went on, and time came to go to the National Mall for the Swearing-In ceremony, things got tight. Really tight. There were times when I couldn’t see the rest of my family for the crowd, who had just a little too much claim to my personal space. I was visually learning things about people that I didn’t care to know—that is how close the crowd was. But thank heavens for that crowd, because other than for the wind blowing across the top of my head, I had completely forgotten it was cold.  Being a national beauty queen, I wasn’t going to let a little cold air keep me from showing off my tiara and title (hoping to catch the eye of some handsome potentate ).  Even when the wind raked across the top of my head with seemingly frigid fingers, all I had to do was duck below shoulder level of the rest of the crowd.  Am I odd? A little. Was I cold? No way.