Ice cream headache from breathing

Soooo cold...so very very cold. It's frickin freezing Austin...I got an ice cream headache from breathing...so cold. I'm starting to miss the desert...no, I take that back...46 degrees celsius by 8am is too hot. I miss mild climates. I miss green things. I miss being able to breathe without a mask/shawl. Don't trees have smells? I forgot... The landscape here is oddly familiar, the terrain is much like Western Colorado, but there's no trees, no agriculture, no scruby shrubs, no pokey cacti, not even rumbling tumbling tumbleweeds...just desert and jagged mountains...very brown, rocky, muddy and snowy.
Qatar is even more alien, that place was just flat sand and nothingness but endless shimmering waves of heat...I remember seeing a 2 inch high weed growing underneath an airconditioner, surviving off the condensate water...I though it was oddly funny because it was the only plant I had seen in a few months...But Qatar has beer, they give you this little beer ration card that allows you to get 3 beers a day...it's really funny to hear the people that are stationed in Qatar lament that they can only have 3 beers as they sit in a base that has never been shelled, rocketed, or attacked...all while troopers on morale trips from Iraq and Afghanistan glare at them with the "you don't know how blessed you are" eyes...amazing the difference a couple hundred miles can make.