Well, maybe ten. Despite the Channel 11 morning news team stealing my "Worst. Winter. Ever." line three or four times an hour, I've gotten over it. Yeah, I regret not not having asserted my intellectual property rights for that language right away. But I've become resigned to my life being full of regrets over stupid stuff I've done and smart stuff I never quite got around to doing. It's time to move on to greener pastures. Like the signs of an imminent spring.
Every one around here (me included) is giddy at the thought of 40+° temps today. But really? It's gonna take quite a few 40° days (in a row) to melt the glaciers that have formed over the last three months. I'm looking for surer signs.
1.) Baseball. Pitchers and catchers reported like three weeks ago and the rest of the rosters within a week after that. We're already getting the injury reports out of Fort Myers that are early guarantees that the Twins are destined for another 90 (or more) loss season. It might be shaping up to be a late spring but even a late spring holds the promise of being followed by a miserable summer.
If the injury reports aren't enough, there's more tied to the approach of baseball. I've gotten my hands on a copy of the 2014 edition of Who's Who in Baseball. This is an annual event for me and by the end of the baseball season it will be dog-eared and ragged from me trying to memorize player statistics that I used to know by heart from playing Strat-O-Matic baseball.. I picked it up at the Barnes and Noble down in Highland (hmmmm; that doesn't sound right, does it?) after Miz Susan sent me out to find a couple copies of a kid's novel for a reading group in her classroom. I paid for the two Lizzie Brights and my WWinBB with a Barnes and Noble gift card Miz Susan found on the floor of one of her school's halls. Ashes to ashes, etc.
2.) Gas prices. Gas prices have shot up over the last few weeks, up to $3.59 at my two-station barometer north of the Lowry Hill tunnel. I've heard reports that the refineries are retooling for summer blends, hence shortages and higher prices; pure ECON 101. Last fall, gas prices jumped on the same stupid-ass excuse. Translation: the Koch Bros. and the other oil barons are feeling the need to finance a few more vacation destination properties for their worthless children. It sucks that prices are up but it means that spring is soon to follow. Why is it, though, that this seasonal blend retooling is something which seems to have sprung up out of nowhere? It's not possible that those great patriot oil barons are lying to us, is it?
3) Parking restrictions. As reported earlier, the City of St. Paul has restricted parking on the even-numbered sides of its residential streets. This is particularly unfair to us on the even-numbered south side of Laurel because much of the far side of the street is taken up by entrances to driveways and there ain't a single one of those on our side (credits to Miz Susan for pointing that out). Those driveway cutouts easily chew up at least a third of the oherwise available parking over there. Yeah, sure, lots of the north side cars end up getting parked in owners' driveways but not enough. Not to mention (but I'm going to anyway) that both Michael across the street and I busted our butts to clear our street frontages to the curb following the city's so-called plowing. If the city had done a proper job of plowing from the get-go, the streets wouldn't have narrowed to the width of dirt roads in unincorporated towns out in the sticks.
The city clearly has no idea of how to handle snow removal to ensure safe and speedy passage for emergency vehicles. Further showing off its lack of savvy, the city enacted restrictions just as the worst of the winter was passing (read: spring's about to get sprung.). Hey municipal workers, don't take this too personally. The dummies in Smallsville across the river declared their parking ban even earlier than St. Paul's.
4) Cats on the loose. Olive and Gray, our two totally-without-merit-except-for-cute cats have developed bad cases of cabin fever. Who hasn't in our neighborhood? For eight months a year, Miz Susan and I keep ourselves in trim by responding to their demands to be let out and then back in about 39 times a day. Miz Susan and I have gotten fat and lazy without that workout routine in our days. The cats want to go out but have been turned back by the icy blasts when they've stuck their noses out the door. Poor kittens; they don't understand this cruel joke any better than the household help does.
This might be changing. When I got home on Friday night from my beloved EnHenn, Olive was out on the front porch. She was nervously pacing, hoping to be let back in. She had to wait until I was done schlepping groceries in from the trunk of the car (yes, parked illegally in front of the house) and she was in like a shot when I finally got the door open. But she had gone out when Susan got home (presumably willingly; I never asked) and she stayed out. Both cats went out this morning on my 9th try to see if our Sunday paper had been delivered yet (this was at 9; a story for another day) and if they didn't stay out for long and never got farther than the top porch step, I'm seeing this as a sign that their internal cat season sensors are telling them that warmer days are coming. Which is OK. Both Miz Susan and I can stand the exercise of doing door attendant duties for our cute but otherwise useless cats.
5) Dreams of our backyard decked out in its midsummer garden finery. It doesn't make any sense to me but, as early as February, Miz Susan's thoughts turn to gardening and turning our backyard into an English country garden riot of color and a near commercial-grade tomato farm. Yeah, you read that right: February. There have been past St. Patrick's Days when I've had to physically restrain her from from grabbing a rake and heading out to the yard to "just clear away a little" of the piles of leaves we'd (I'd) covered our annuals with the fall before. Despite the history of physical restraint and the repeated warnings of Belinda and Bobby Jensen Saturday mornings to stay the hell off the lawn and out of the garden until things have dried out a little, she's still always going to be determined to get outside and start mucking around. Maybe the insidious influence of Downton Abbey has driven her a little crazier over the last couple of years. She's already making me address her as M'Lady so I know there's been some effect on her.
I cringe when the time for her to start gardening can't be reasonably postponed any longer. That's the time when she and our friend Molly will spend long hours of planning what's going to get planted and where. My involvement in the process consists of being handed a shovel of one sort or another, being pointed in the direction of a stretch of real estate and told to start digging. For a rest break, I'm allowed to haul 40 lb. bags of cow manure in from the car (into which I'd loaded them shortly before) or to empty the compost bin and work the contents into the dug up real estate. Or to reconnect hundreds of feet of hose to the spigot on the side of the house. I know it's unreasonable to cringe at these prospect but...there you have it.
Maybe it's the longer stretch of daylit hours (which just picked up a bonus at 2 this morning) but Miz Susan has started to stir into that pre-planting twitchiness. Another sure sign that spring is on its way to getting sprung. Full disclosure: I feel the need to play wet blanket just a little bit. The state high school boys' and girls' basketball tournaments are coming up soon and established Minnesota folk wisdom says that those are always accompanied by blizzards. Don't put the shovels away just yet.
Hey, notwithstanding the current snow cover and the absolute certainty that it's gonna get added to, there's worse things to look forward to than spring. Like the income tax filing deadline. Good thing that's still months away, right?
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