After - for some reason - answering my iPhone with the tip of my nose or chin (and occasionally, even the edge of a lip), I've finally smartened up (I guess one has to "smarten up" if he's to be able to operate his smart phone in a way that isn't - well - stupid...), and got myself a couple of pairs of gloves that can be used with smart phones with or without touch screens, as well as other devices with touch screens.

I suppose I haven't really thought of it before because a) before this Winter I was using a four-year-old Blackberry (no touch screen), or else touch-screen devices other than an iPhone. SO, since Winters in Massachusetts aren't usually quite so unrelentingly and bitterly cold, it hadn't been a big deal to remove my gloves in order to use the phone or, say, a GPS device or Kindle.

THIS year our Winter is a-whole-nother thing! We're just seeing a whole lot more days and nights were the temperature, without adding the wind-chill factor, is close to zero. So, adding wind makes it colder. Also, we're just seeing a whole lot of days and nights that are just plain awfully cold (dangerously cold). While it's true that removing gloves long enough to answer a phone call isn't going to lead to frost bite (unless one doesn't put the gloves back on for, say, twenty minutes on a lot of these days), it's just kind unbearable much of the time this year.

Besides, as someone who is a little (no a lot) compulsive about keeping my screens smudge-free, I really don't want to be answering my phone with "make-up face", especially when make-face doesn't happen until I first make it Winter-moisturizer face because, after all, it's been so unrelentingly, bloody, cold my face will most certainly become brittle and fall off if I don't use moisturizer....

So anyway, I don't know why it took me so long to address the whole matter of using phones (and other touch screens) without having to freeze off my hands; but I finally decided to address it. (Maybe I did some foot-dragging because I can't really say I like the little gray-dot finger-tips on the touch-screen gloves. Whatever....

I got myself some "gray-dot" gloves for touch screens, particularly the phone; and some perfectly fine (well, perfectly cheap, actually) gloves that don't cover the finger-tips at all - for use with the teensy,tiny, keypad on the Blackberry.

None of this Earth-shatteringly news-worthy, of course. I was just trying to think up something kind of harmless to post.

Note: The only thing is, however, that the gray-dot kind of gloves look pretty much like their owner has been clearing off a muddy/slushy car window with her hands, rather than an ice-scraper.

Photo: ME Whelan