That Rainy Day Feeling

Functioning at the mercy of El Nino’s schedule, Virginia Pfau and her two small boys have done it all. They’ve pitched a tent in the living room, endured game after game of housebound hide-and-seek--even roasted marshmallows in the fireplace.

Like scores of other stir-crazies, the Newport Beach mom has become creative with indoor activities.

“I come up with what I can to keep them busy,” says Pfau, 34. “This rain is terrible.”

During what has become the wettest February in history, many Southern Californians have experienced their first case of cabin fever, which Webster’s defines as “extreme irritability and restlessness from living in isolation or a confined indoor area for a prolonged time.”

And with more storms likely, more cabin fever is too.

Whether you’re dealing with the tantrums of children, restless pets, wet bags of groceries or yet another canceled round of golf, experts say, the El Nino blues are real--and so are its symptoms.

“It is a true form of clinical depression,” Brea clinical social worker Toni Aquino says in describing seasonal affective disorder, a condition believed to be directly linked to the amount of available daylight.

“People who haven’t lived back East, I think they really have a difficult time with it,” she says.

According to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center of Dallas, those who suffer from seasonal depression may lack energy during the winter months. They may sleep more than normal yet still not feel rested, lacking much enthusiasm for life. They often have an increased appetite, especially for sweets.

While many of us feel this way from time to time, those with seasonal depression experience this feeling for days or weeks, and it happens to them every winter. Shorter days and the lack of sunlight trigger the condition, and light therapy is often used in treatment.

But for the vast majority of El Nino shut-ins, a more basic method of light therapy is indicated:

The great outdoors.

Specifically the great outdoors without the need for rain gear.

“When the sun comes out, we grab our coats and run out the door like the house is on fire,” says Tracy Montgomery, steering 3-year-old twins Kerri and Kyle away from a mud bog at Mile Square Park in Fountain Valley.

Her daily routine dictated by the evening weather report, Montgomery welcomed the sun when it showed this week. She brought a towel to the playground to wipe the puddles from the swing seats.

“I’m from Michigan, but I am so spoiled now,” she says. “This whole El Nino thing should make me thankful for the great weather we usually have, but I hate it.

In Buffalo, N.Y., where “it gets so cold it hurts,” cabin fever aficionados say El Nino lacks the frozen left hook that Old Man Winter swings every year at their end of the map.

“Rain? Here in Buffalo, we laugh at rain,” says Charlie Mikolajczyk, 40, who designs weather graphics for WKBW-TV in Buffalo.

“One year, they were cross-country skiing down my street,” he says. “The wind-chill makes you dread going outside. Now, that’s weather.”

But Mikolajczyk says he truly empathizes with the blues brought on by inclement weather.

“You really do get depressed. It’s the lack of light more than anything. You’re looking for recreation . . . a lot of people over eat,” he says.

Or partake in indoor activities ranging from reading books, watching television or simply snuggling up.

All the indoor recreation time raises a question:

Will there be the pitter-patter of an El Nino baby boom in California delivery rooms, say, nine months from now?

The East Coast blackout of 1965 and major blizzards in the Midwest put a blip on the birth rates 40 weeks later.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” says Ken Levy, a family therapist in Pasadena who treats seasonal depression. “In that way, El Nino might have a positive, long-term seasonal effect. There might be a lot of young girls running around called ‘La Nina.’ ”

Or Stormy.

Besides the lack of sunlight, experts say other factors contribute to cabin fever.

Family members in close quarters with no means of escape grow irritable, colds and flu attack, and the gray gloom of the morning often stretches right through to bedtime.

“It sounds like a little thing, kids play with their toys more when they’re stuck inside,” Aquino says. “I have mothers who say, ‘I’ve cleaned the house four times today, and it looks worse than when I started’ . . . things like that get you down.”

Although Pfau says she and sons Nico, 3, and Alessandro Coppola, 5, miss the trademark California sunshine, they are determined to make the best of their time indoors.

“Sometimes you get desperate, building an entire fort, destroying your living room,” Pfau says as she bakes chocolate tarts in the kitchen as a son plays pirates underfoot. “On rainy days, your house becomes a playground.”