What Do You Mean It's Winter Again?

Winter, in all of its inherent evilness, has completely thrown my normal cold-weather coping mechanisms out of whack.

You see, typically January and February are cold, dark months where the temperature is rarely above fifteen degrees and the chances of freezing off a digit are fairly good if you don’t pay attention. I deal with this by giving up on those two months before they ever start. I square my shoulders, grit my teeth, and become angrier at winter than it is at me. It’s a good system, and eventually winter gives up and goes away when it realizes it can’t break me.

However, winter slacked off a bit in the last few weeks and the temperatures were in the thirties. It was nice to walk to my car in the morning without feeling like if I didn’t move fast enough I may actually freeze in place. This made me happy, and I wandered around whistling a jolly tune, totally ignorant of winter’s wicked plan to soften me up and shatter my cold weather anger.

Now this week the temperatures have plummeted back to where they typically reside, and I find myself ill-equipped to handle them. I am now a shivering mess who, when forced to go outside, feels like shrieking and then running back inside, even if the place I am leaving is work.

My only hope is that my winter anger will build back up quickly and I will be able to battle it to a standstill in early April.

So, please wish me luck. And, if you need me, I’ll probably be curled up into a ball in bed.

Side Note – This is my first blog posting about the weather. I feel I am well on my way to becoming an old man! Now I need a pipe and to take up smoking it.

The Legend Of The Alabama Shirt

At this point it looks more like a rag than it does a shirt.

The hole for the neck is wearing badly, and there is big hole right just below the tag in the back. There are several other smaller holes further down. The print on both sides has faded quite a bit, although you can still make it out. Each time I wash it I’m afraid it will simply disintegrate.

Still, I have no plans to throw it away.

I’m speaking of my Alabama concert t-shirt, which I bought in Milwaukee in 2003 during Alabama’s farewell tour. It cost $25 and I know I’ve gotten more than my money’s worth out of it.

It’s just had too many adventures to throw away. The first was when I met my friend Sean during that trip, where we’d both bought the same shirt at the concert. There was a whole group of us and we stayed in a hotel that night. We had two rooms, and Sean and I were in the same one, even though we really didn’t know each other at that point. As it turns out, the other people in our room woke up early and left for home, leaving only us two to wait on the people in the other room.

Having nothing better to do we turned on the TV and watched the last hour of a John Wayne movie. This turned out to be disappointing because during that time there was absolutely no violence. I think that’s why I haven’t watched a John Wayne movie since. I mean, you don’t watch John Wayne for character development. You watch it for good old fashioned western entertainment, which includes gunplay and fistfights, and this movie had none. It’s John Wayne and your telling me the last hour is nothing but dialog? Aaarrrgghhh!

After the movie we were bored so we both donned our Alabama shirts. This was the first indicator that we both didn’t mind acting and looking like total morons all in the name of fun. So, completely matching, we bought what turned out to be horrible root beer from a vending machine and took a stroll around the neighborhood. Nothing exciting happened there, except we almost got eaten by a dog.

Then it was time for breakfast so we bought muffins from Perkins. This of course led to us sitting down on the curb outside of Perkins, where we ate muffins and waved at passing cars just to see who would wave back.

Ah, the memories.

The shirt has been through a lot since then. I’ve recently put it into semi-retirement, to prolong its life-span, but it still has a place of honor on the floor or wherever I happen to throw it.

So here’s to you, faded old Alabama t-shirt! May the memories continue to be made! And please don’t give me a rash or anything from being so old.

If I Could Turn Back Time

This morning I woke up before my alarm. Typically, when this happens I only have a few minutes left before I’m supposed to get up. I then spend that time trying to relax, but failing miserably at it, as the precious time remaining ticks by loudly in my head.

However, today was one of those good days when you look at the clock and realize that you still have a couple of hours left before your alarm goes off. This is good, because in the world of waking up before your alarm, two hours is like several years and you can then relish the wonderful feeling of slowly returning to hibernation.

But as satisfying as that can be, it's not the ultimate scenario.

The ultimate scenario takes a lot more than good timing. This is when you wake up and see that you only have a few minute left. However, instead of giving in to the unfairness of life, you instead go on the offensive and close your eyes, concentrate very hard, and mentally force time to go backwards until you then have two or three more hours left to sleep.

I’ve only had this happen to me once, and it was absolutely glorious. It was one of the highlights of my life, to be honest. There’s nothing like looking at the clock, cursing fate, and then, out of sheer desperation, literally bending time with your will, all to make life fit into your schedule, insteading of making yourself fit into it's schedule.

Now you cynical folk out there may think that I misread the clock before I mentally changed time, but I choose not to believe that. This is because I feel I deserved for it to have happened. Why? Because it makes up for the times I woke up, stumbled to the kitchen, and was eating breakfast before I realized that it was 4:00 a.m.

How To Be A Lions Fan

Being a Detroit Lion’s fan, I have long since realized that I will never be able to derive any enjoyment from actually rooting for them, as they will forever be stuck somewhere amidst their grand 78 year rebuilding plan.

So, when your team is horrible, the only real fun you can have is rooting against other teams. For me, this comes down to mainly the Viking and the Packers, since they play in the same division and have winning streaks against the Lions that probably date back to the eighties.

As you may guess, I was enjoyed the Packers losing to the Cardinals yesterday, although I will say I was impressed with the comeback the Packer mounted. It was also fun to be at work today, as the first two hours or so were devoted to angry Packers fans complaining about just about everything. This was in stark contrast to the silence and gloom that hung over the workplace after the playoff game against Philadelphia a few years ago where Freddie Mitchell, who is also known for wearing bow ties and thanking his hands for being so great, caught a pass on 4th and 26 to help send the game into overtime, which the Eagles eventually won after Brett Favre was intercepted on a moon ball that looked more like a punt than a pass.

So, I’m feeling pretty happy.

This leaves next week when the Vikings play the Cowboys. Actually, the Cowboys have always been quite irritating, so it will be hard to root for them. Still, I would like to see the Vikings lose. This is mainly because they are incredibly annoying. For example, I was in Minnesota a few weeks ago and I heard a radio advertisement for the Vikings where the announcer said in his Serious Announcer Tone: “Your home of the first place Vikings! Next stop: Miami!” Apparently the Super Bowl is in the bag. I would have liked to bonk my head on something, but I was driving at the time so I had to settle on gritting my teeth. I mean, have you counted any un-hatched chickens lately? Sheesh.

Of course I realize that I am a hateful person to get my jollies on rooting against others. But I do have the perfect excuse: I’m a Lions fan. It’s lucky I’m not even more mentally deranged. So there.

Questions Galore

I’ve noticed something at work now that winter has arrived. It seems that people are taking their snow brushes into the building with them, and then carrying them back out to their car when they leave.

Obviously they are doing this so that they don’t have to open their car door to retrieve the brush if there is snow on their vehicle to remove. This makes sense if your car is entirely covered in a lot of snow. In that case, when you open the door to get your brush, you get a large swirl of snow that blows in and covers the interior.

However, what makes me question this is the fact that it’s Central Wisconsin. It’s not like you get that much snow in an eight-hour period. Certainly not enough to bury your car and make it worth having your brush on hand.

So, is this just a case of people outsmarting themselves? Do they think they are being clever? Isn’t the risk of forgetting to bring their brush out with them and having to go back greater than the rewards of being able to brush off a light dusting of snow from their vehicle without having to open their car door?

This topic is making my head swirl, and it brings to mind a few further questions: How weird am I to even be thinking about this? Shouldn’t I be minding my own business, like Hank Williams Jr. tells us to do in his song ‘Mind Your Own Business'? Why does it matter to me what other people are doing? Why do people like reality TV shows? Do I just have an unnatural hatred of people, which makes me cynical of everything they do? Or did I just need a topic for a blog, and this was all that I had to go with?

I think I need to lie down for a while. I’m mentally exhausted.

Huffing and Puffing Into 2010

There’s nothing like playing that first game of basketball of the New Year. It is here that you realize just how much food you ate during the Christmas season, as all of the telltale signs of being out of shape are present:

• You are breathing hard and have to rest after lacing up your sneakers.
• As you run down the court you have a sneaking suspicion that you are leaving craters behind you.
• You realize you have the lung capacity roughly equal to the volume of a cigarette package.
• Your vertical leap now measures about a half of an inch.

Still, it is the first step to your New Year’s resolution of not having to reinforce your bed to keep you from falling through, so you have to gamely fight through.

As you have probably guessed, I just experienced this today. Still, I did better than I thought I would, by which I mean I didn’t pass out.

It was fun, too. However, there were a bunch of guys playing who couldn’t have been very far out of high school, which meant they could have run for several days straight without getting tired, along with a bunch of guys in my situation, huffing and puffing the whole time. It was kind of annoying to watch the young guys run around, and I’m pretty sure us old guys each had thoughts of sitting on them for a while just to get them to slow down.

But despite my troubles, I resolve to plug on ahead! Heck, I even voluntarily ate spinach today, and it wasn’t even a part of a dare or anything! And to help motivate me, I have begun to try and project a picture of my ultimate goal in my mind, and it is a glorious site indeed: it is me, fully restored to my peak of athleticism.

That’s right, I’m going for it all: the one inch vertical!

Estivant Pines

It's funny that despite that fact that I grew up in the U.P., there are still many U.P. sights I have yet to see.

I can scratch the Estivant Pines off of that list, though. Going in the winter was nice, because we were the only people there at the time and had the whole place to ourselves. At first I was expecting dramatically big trees everywhere, which turns out to not be the case. There are big trees, but they are spaced out throughout the sancuary.

Still, it was an enjoyable place to snowshoe. We hiked both loops, which was a total of about 3 miles. The trail was fairly well marked, and the only sign of civiliazation was the occasional far-off rumble of a snowmobile. It was nice and quiet and picturesque, with the snow blanketing the landscape and hanging in the trees.

The only downside were the frozen provisions. Still, it's kind of fun having to suck on a licorice stick for a while just to soften it up so you can finally eat it. I guess that's roughing it.