WALKIN', WRITIN', WIT & WHIMSY

I wasn’t even sure I wanted to go outside this morning – it was Friday the 13th after all, and the second one in this young year, with another one slated for November.

But out I went, being careful not to step on any cracks, or let any black cats cross my path. No one was using a stepladder at that time of day so … whew, I did not have to worry about walking underneath a ladder that I happened to encounter along the way.

I can’t say that I suffer from paraskavedekatriaphobia, or fear of Friday the 13th. And, I am not really superstitious either, although I did have a few errands to do today and said to myself “well, they can wait ‘til next week” … that reasoning was just in case there was some kind of funky Friday the 13th karma lurking out there, and I sure didn’t want to be part of it.

Now, I’ve known people in the past who were superstitious about certain days. Both were former co-workers and I’ve lost track of them through the years, so I don’t know if they still have their intense fears.

A secretary named Sandy refused to leave her home every Friday the 13th and sequestered herself there until the entire day had passed.

A young attorney named Kim had successive mishaps on March 15th, a/k/a “The Ides of March” or the day when Julius Caesar was assassinated back on March 15, B.C. Kim was certainly one who should have heeded the warning to “beware the Ides of March”.

The first time she was jogging in the morning, something she did year round, even most Winter days. She somehow made a misstep, slid on a piece of black ice, whereupon she fell at an awkward angle, shattering her slender ankle into many pieces, much like the fate of a valuable race horse who has stumbled and gone down hard. She had to have surgery with multiple pins put in her ankle and was on crutches with a huge cast, then a walking cast, for much of the Summer and Fall that year.

After a grueling recovery, the following March 15th, Kim left work, headed to the parking garage and hopped into her new, bright blue and pink “Splash” pick-up truck. Soon the passenger door opened and a tall stranger was in the seat beside her brandishing a gun and telling her not to scream or she would be sorry. He grabbed then stuffed her open purse under his heavy jacket. She started the truck, and they wound their way around the seven levels of the Buhl Garage and finally reached the gate. She reached up behind the visor to grab her access pass, and nervously tried to stall leaving the garage by purposely swiping it incorrectly. The intruder got angry and said “no games – go through the gate” so she turned the card correctly, the gate lifted and they left the safe confines of the garage. They headed down Jefferson Avenue and soon turned onto a side street in Greektown where he gruffly told her to “get out now”. She scrambled out the door and he slid over to the spot she vacated and sped away. She had no cellphone to call the police and went into a restaurant, tears streaming down her face and shaking like a leaf. The owner called the police, and they scoured the area for her truck and her missing purse, but neither were found. The locks had to be changed on all the office doors. It was a harrowing experience to be sure, and from that day forward she vowed to never leave the house on the “Ides of March”.

So dates can be pretty significant sometimes.

But sometimes the numbers game can be fun.

Like bracketology.

I heard an interesting statistic on the news yesterday about the annual NCAA college basketball tournament that we refer to simply as “March Madness”. A statistician said that sometimes a grandmother who knows nothing about basketball, could sit down and fill out her predictions with just about as much accuracy as a person who spent hours, if not days, analyzing team stats and player prowess, then painstaking pores over and creates a bracket sheet. Well that was interesting, albeit not so believable. I’ve seen the form for bracket sheets plenty of times at the office, but wouldn’t even know how to start working on one. Whenever I’ve picked squares for the office football pool, just by eeny-meeny-miny-moe, I’ve won a few times, but then there is no skill involved in that exercise, just Lady Luck prevailing.

It sure is hard to pick potential lottery prize numbers. How do you guess? Is it scientific or do you just close your eyes and see where the nib of your pencil lands or do you tell the computer to pick for you? When the lottery in Michigan first began in November 1972, just a few months later, lucky 53-year old Hermus Millsaps was the winner of the first million-dollar prize. The media covered his arrival at the lottery office where he was presented with an over-sized check of his winnings. He was just an “ordinary Joe” who worked at Chrysler and he soon piddled his big prize away and died pretty much penniless in 2002.

But, based on ol’ Herman’s luck in that very first Lotto game, my mom and I decided to play the lottery too. We put our heads together and devised our six numbers for the bet sheet based on a configuration of our birthday info, phone number and house address. Then, clutching that configuration of lucky digits (1, 2, 3, 8, 19 and 21), hopefully a potentially final numbers combo, I hustled to the Lotto retailer, took their number two pencil, filled in the little boxes and handed over two quarters with my fingers crossed. That Saturday night, as luck would have it, the numbers were pulled and we had four numbers. We won a whopping $37.00 and immediately decided we would play that combo of numbers forever. Well, we played for years thereafter and never won another dime.

If all this foolishness about numbers was not enough, tomorrow mathematicians the world over will recognize and celebrate Pi Day, 03/14, which symbolizes Pi, or the ratio of a circle’s circumference: 3.14. Did you know that Congress designated March 14th as Pi Day back in 2009?

Well, even if numbers are not your game, you can celebrate too. Your choice … berry or cream, so there!

This morning it was murky but mild, and, in the distance, way down in Wyandotte, I heard the cattle-like lowing of the foghorn’s mournful call as I walked out the door. I set out for a brief respite from the confines of the house, eager to get a breath of fresh air that was above the freezing mark.

The words “Spring Fling” are far from racy or suggestive as regards this title … not in the least. They are, for me, just the almost-ceremonial first day after a long and cold Winter where the bulky clothes are cast aside in favor of lighter and more-seasonable ones.

I actually get more excited on the first day I feel the warm Spring sun on my head, or, when I return home from a walk carrying my jacket or sweater looped around a finger or slung around my waist. That’s a feel-good moment for sure.

But I felt compelled to recognize the Spring-like day after the brutally cold weather we’ve endured these past two months.

So, as I walked out the door this morning, it was sans the scarf, and the mittens were replaced by more-fashionable gloves. I also banished the boots, ditched the down-filled parka and shucked the Sherpa hat.

What item is the next to go?

Well, I’ll never tell.

Ahhh, a flirtation with Spring is good for the Winter-weary soul.

Sleep was already somewhat compromised by losing an hour of precious ZZZZZZZs due to the Daylight Saving Time event, without having slumber encumbered by an annoying clicking noise deep into the night.

Now, I am not usually one of those people who stew and fret about that 60 minutes whittled from the weekend every Spring, but this time it was downright annoying.

Though it is smarter to adjust ALL the clocks the night before, I usually don’t, save for my duo of trusty alarm clocks. I say “trusty” because I’ve owned this pair of identical alarm clocks for decades. I am disciplined enough to rarely use the snooze feature, but I do set the two clocks to ring off about a half-hour apart, lest I return to Sleepy Land and make myself late.

Last night I sped the clock hands around to spring forward for the time change, then pulled the alarm buttons out. In the middle of the night, however, I awoke to a loud clicking – it was dark, of course, and the noise was by my head and next to the bed. I turned on the nightstand lamp and found the culprit … the hands had fallen off the spindle on one of the clocks. There they were, wedged rather pitifully, at the base of the clock face. Every time the second hand swept past those dilapidated hands, it made a horrible clickety-clacking noise. For a brief moment I thought there was some kind of “Hickory, Dickory Dock” shenanigans going on.

So … what to do?

I picked up the clock and jiggled it around, hoping that the wayward hands might miraculously land back in the right place. No such luck. Not wanting to tear myself from my comfy, curled-up position in the warm bed to try to perform surgery on an alarm clock, I yanked the battery out, feeling quite proud of myself for having dealt with that little fix-it since I was still half asleep.

Ahhh, peace and quiet again.

Except of course, the first alarm went off, and I said “pfft” and waited on the second one ….

Well, that blew a good portion of my Sunday since I didn’t wake up for hours afterward.

I have always had a quirky bond with clocks; in fact, it’s almost a love-hate relationship.

My kitchen clock is very old and every time there is a time change, I hold my breath that the battery stays in place since I must nudge it to access the dial to move the hands. Sometimes, that C battery will slide out of the compartment slightly, then when the chimes start at the top of the hour, it is a rather bizarre noise … a kind of slow-motion “boing”, “boing”, “boing” ‘til it gets relief, i.e. pushing the battery back in place, or installing a new one. That clock’s pendulum has always been wacky, so, upon replacing the clock on the wall, I must tilt the whole thing this way and that to start the pendulum, then slow it down. Otherwise, I’ll be typing along and in my peripheral vision, I see this brass disc dancing back and forth crazily. It always reminds me of those Kit-Cat Kitty Cat Clocks, those kitchen clocks that have been around for eons where the black cat’s eyes shift to and fro and the tail swings back and forth like a pendulum.

And, I know I should peek at the car manual to get directions on resetting the car clock since it got messed up when I got the new battery a month ago. I don’t want to wait ‘til my next trip to the dealership for the most-recent recall since they don’t know when the parts are coming in.

Tempus fugit is a very eloquent way in Latin to say that time flies …it seems we just did this clock-changing exercise, and, all too soon November 1st will be here and we’ll be doing the time change once again.

This morning the brilliant blue sky belied the cold temps – it was only 18 degrees, but if you forgot about the cold for a few minutes, you could pretend that it was warm and sunny, even if the sun’s piercing rays were just there for show. Ol’ Sol took his own sweet time creating an eventual slow-mo snow and ice meltdown, but not at that hour.

Further gazing around, with a little stretch of the imagination, you could conjure up images of piles of sand twinkling with beach glass, knowing full well that it was really big mounds of snow which sparkled with a crunchy, glazed-looking surface that looked as if it had been shellacked, courtesy of Tuesday’s freezing rain.

Imagination is good for the Winter-weary soul.

But, cheer up because Spring is now only a dozen days away.

No one can wait, especially as the temps kept rising today ‘til we topped the 40-degree mark.

At the grocery store, besides jelly beans and bunnies, Meijer was chock full of rain boots and brollies, and even beach gear, all as if to signal that April and May were just around the corner. The featured fruit this week was strawberries. Mmmmmmmm. They looked scrumptious, bright red and luscious, like misshapen hearts with mini yellow dots, tumbling around in their oblong plastic boxes.

The media and 7-Eleven have been teasing us by touting the newest Slurpee flavor which debuts later this month. It is none other than hometown favorite – Faygo Redpop strawberry soda, made right here in Detroit. While a Slurpee may not sound too appealing on a chilly day, the thought of 50 degrees this Wednesday is incentive enough to hunt down one of those tall slushy drinks.

Yup, I think we might be turning a corner in this long and never-ending Winter season.

“Sparrow on a Cold Winter’s Day”
Image and copyright by Rodney Campbell: https://www.flickr.com/photos/acrylicartist/16323571509

Spring must be just around the corner.

Or … so they say.

The birds are singing louder and the Scotsman with the heavy brogue who touts Scotts crabgrass killer has returned to the airwaves.

Well, that all sounds promising, despite our smorgasbord of bad weather yesterday wherein Mother Nature dealt out every type of weather card imaginable over the course of the day.

We started out with a quick two inches of snow, followed by freezing rain, then it warmed up a little and then we had “regular” rain … lovely.

So this morning, after I booted up and suited up, I slipped out the side door, gingerly stepping down on the glassy-looking, ice-slickened sidewalk, taking great care to shuffle slowly to the garage. Some spots were bumpy, some just glazed over and I didn’t want to wipe out. I heard a big truck huffing and puffing nearby and wondered if it was a Zamboni coming to smooth out my driveway and sidewalk which surely rivaled an ice rink.

The sky was gray, and the sun was absent, however, the birds who formerly congregated in the two plum trees on my next-door-neighbor’s property, were huddled together yonder as if they were in some type of birdie kaffeeklatsch. I listened to their twittering as I inched down the sidewalk, and their cheery notes gave me hope that perhaps Spring may not be far off.

Those sparrows had to relocate to new digs after the two diseased trees split in the November 24th windstorm and were removed by the City. I wondered where the birds disappeared to because I really missed hearing their cheeps and chirps all Winter while I was outside.

But, suddenly … there they were, sparrows lined up like soldiers, their uniforms a drab brown color, with many pair of delicate feet gripping the sturdy branch.

They were singing their little hearts out … that is, until they saw me.

Then they stopped.

They looked me up and down, and, as if shaking their heads, probably wondered aloud why I was bedecked in a down coat, big hat and lug boots, and treading so slowly down the pathway. It was, after all, finally above the freezing mark.

I went in and started up the car, then stole another glance over at the contingent of sparrows while I stood in the driveway waiting for the car exhaust to exit the garage so I could close the door.

Perhaps they were studying me, happy to know they only had to lift off and fly to navigate from Point “A” to “Point B” and none of this silly baby steps stuff.

They finally resumed singing, having deemed me “safe” and no threat, even though I was wearing a coat stuffed with feathers. They probably wished they were like their counterparts who flew South, instead of hanging out here and toughin’ it out. I don’t know if they regret their lot in life, but I know I am ready to soar right past the tail end of Winter into some more seasonable weather … soon.

Day after day, the weather has definitely grabbed the headlines.

And Mother Nature and Old Man Winter have ganged up on us again and again.

They have not discriminated on where to inflict their wrath.

Nope. It doesn’t matter what part of the USA you live in – today you are “it”.

The Big Chill continues here and has virtually eliminated the walking regimen as you must surrender to the elements. Walking these days is just a Catch-22 … either the sidewalks are clear but it is too brutally cold to walk, or, it is not sub-zero, but it is snowing like crazy.

I miss my regimen of springing out of bed to have breakfast, get some piddling things done in the house and then going out for a walk.

Instead, a ritual has replaced the regimen wherein I feel like Fred the Baker at Dunkin’ Donuts who sleepwalks from his bed straight out of the house into the cold and snow mumbling “time to make the donuts” … oh horrors, I have become that guy. These days the alarm goes off and I look at it as if I’ve never seen it before, while slamming down the buzzer and rolling over with a sneer. Who wants to leave the confines of the cozy bed, having trudged out day after day in this, the second coldest February on record?

Once again my friends in both Carolinas and Virginia got a day off from work today so they did not need to contend with the heavy snow and ice. Their Facebook walls groan with Wintry-like pics, as their pals in the cold-weather states commiserate and cluck our tongues, and, of course share their pain. I hope none of my pals gave up swearing or sweets for Lent as they muddle through the rest of this almost-freakish weather, because I’m sure they have succumbed to their respective downfalls by now.

I say let’s just bypass March and go straight to April.

Yup, the yeas have it.

Well, it wasn’t because I hibernated like a bear (though I wish I could have in those subzero temps and nearly -30 wind chills we’ve had the past few days).

And … it wasn’t because I was hot and shucked off all my thermal layers and ran naked as a jaybird across the frozen tundra.

Nope.

None of those things.

The truth is that I went nearly 2 ½ days without accessing the internet or any social media.

It wasn’t by choice.

My internet connection was down.

Social media is very addicting . We titter over Twitter, and who doesn’t love chuckling over jokes? It is great perusing pics from back in the day posted on friends’ Facebook walls for TBT. There is no better opportunity to stay in touch with friends or family, especially if we are lame letter writers or despise long-winded phone conversations.

On Ash Wednesday morning I was reading comments on the “Click on Detroit” Facebook site about what people would give up for Lent nowadays. The graphic that accompanied the story had a variety of suggestions – alot of different words actually, like junk food, soda, swearing, sweets and all types of social media. Could you abandon social media and give up Twitter, Facebook or e-mail for the whole Lenten season which stretches some 40 days? I moved on to the next item on Facebook since I could not abandon e-mail and need to have internet access because I have worked from home the past six years. But, even if I didn’t work from home, I confess, sure … I’d miss the internet.

I have thought for a long time that we are way too dependent on social media. I use Facebook for chats with friends, but now I use it primarily to connect to 175 fellow “Patchies” – a group of e-pals, who, like me, either write blogs, columns, or have editorial responsibilities at Patch.com. We connect in a group and share ideas and links to our latest posts.

Internet is a must-have for me to remote into work. And we’ve been busy the past few weeks as my boss was leaving Wednesday morning to go out of town for five days. After he landed at the airport, he called me and said he had revised a 30-page time-sensitive document and would go to Staples and send a PDF of the revisions to me. I joked that perhaps he should have taken a book on the plane instead. Dutifully, I turned the computer on after the phone call – no internet. Well, we have a Plan “B” for when my router malfunctions – I rely on Ethernet cables to hard wire the laptop to the modem. Well, that works … as long as the modem works and I have an internet connection. I knew it was going to be a long evening.

Last April I got a new modem from my internet service provider and a new state-of-the-art router. I figured I was good to go for at least three or four years. Last Wednesday, I lost my connection for three hours because my ISP was having “issues in the neighborhood”. It was annoying but I dealt with it. Then this past Wednesday when it happened again, I made a quick call and the company confirmed there were “issues in the neighborhood”. Wryly, I mumbled to myself “is this going to be like Prince Spaghetti Day – an every-Wednesday occurrence?” I shut down my computer and came back long after the expected time for restoration of service. That dreaded bright yellow shield was still displayed in the connection bars hours after the estimated completion of service time.

Stubbornly, I stayed at the computer, hoping to will the internet to spring back to life. I began writing my next blog post, yet all the while my right eye was trained to the task bar waiting for the yellow shield to disappear. Meanwhile, the clock kept ticking and the hours were sliding away, with that project to be done languishing somewhere in cyberspace.

Finally, I did a diagnostic and knew I had to re-connect.

I trudged downstairs to do the usual fix-its … pull out all the plugs, count to 10, replace them and wait for the line of colors on the router and modem to start up like a string of lights on a Christmas tree. I held my breath and tapped my foot. All systems were go on the router … but, not so much on the modem where green lights blinked and flickered. Green for everything else in the world usually signifies “go”, but I needed orange lights. Not good. This modem has no reset button. Clearly, the modem was down for the count. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.

I raced back upstairs where a slew of phone calls then ensued – first to my boss to tell him the joyous news. The second call was to my ISP, where I, the angry customer, wanted to know why her new modem was no longer functioning now that “work in the neighborhood” was finished. I then semi-politely inquired if a ping might restore the modem so that its flashing orange lights would return and I’d know “all systems were go”.

Well, first we had to troubleshoot. Back-and-forth to the basement, where it was decided the ping to the modem did not resuscitate it and it was dead as a doornail. I sighed a few more times and headed back upstairs.

At midnight, we finished troubleshooting and I politely asked for the earliest appointment Thursday so that I could complete my deadline assignment, and, I again stressed the urgency of having my internet hook-up restored post-haste. “Ms. Linda” he began … “we can schedule you in between noon and two on Thursday and you will get a new modem. Now, can I interest you in a bundle?” “No” I barked, totally bypassing my manners and leaving any of the ladylike responses I was brought up to automatically mouth when asked a question, way behind in the dust. I replaced the receiver with a loud thud, thinking that the phone was the next thing to break, then I scurried off to bed.

When my tech arrived at the door on Thursday, the temperature and wind chills were dangerously low. I ushered him into the house and we discussed the weather as we went downstairs to the basement. He did his usual techy checks and turned to me and said “your upstream/downstream isn’t looking good here” … well, I wanted to quip that could be bad if I were a salmon, but kept that comment to myself.

Next he unpackaged a new modem. I spied that large, jet black modem, thinking it was the perfect fit for my over-sized Netgear Nighthawk router I had installed last Spring and it looked like a big brother to my spindly current modem which always tips over. He moved the new modem and cord near the register where the heat was pouring out after saying “it was so cold in the truck that the modem needs to heat up and I can’t get the cord to straighten out” … I started to say “well, we don’t want to have a kinky modem” but that sounded like some shady line out of the movie or book “50 Shades of Grey” so I cancelled that comment though it was on the tip of my tongue.

I watched his cold fingers as they fumbled with gizmos and gadgets and he tested this and that. He made notes on a tiny device, thumbs tapping furiously on the keyboard. Not being a texter myself, I marveled at the dexterity when surely his hands must’ve been very cold.

He explained as he went along, that he went through a process of elimination and then said “gotta check your wiring in the backyard – back in a bit”; he returned some twenty minutes later, with snow-encrusted pant legs and a beet red face, and announced “well, I rewired everything out back because those wires were in pretty bad shape, so I don’t know how you ever got a signal before at all” to which I nodded sagely, thinking to myself, this surely will be the fix.

After more diagnostics, he shook his head, however, and said “still not good – gotta go to the pole, back in 20 minutes” … I stayed downstairs, while 20 minutes turned into an hour. I saw his shadow in the window well and could hear his cleats going back and forth on the sidewalk. Finally, he emerged, redder in the face and through numb lips said “I couldn’t find anything wrong, but there is an outage – I’ll call it in as soon as my phone is unfrozen” whereupon he pointed to his personal phone and a work phone, similar in size, which were clapped together, their rubber edges frozen seemingly forever. He tried to pry them apart with all his might, and couldn’t, so I told him to stand under the ceiling heat register where his fingers and the phones could get unfrozen quickly.

He reported the outage and promised the problem would be repaired within two hours and I’d be back in business.

Well, that was good news and I shot back a wan smile, which was the best I could muster after the first day of “going bare”.

By Thursday night, there was still no internet. Another late-night call to the ISP who said to go unplug everything and she’d send a modem signal. Despite my protestations that I’d been there and done that already, I was told to “go back and do it again” … nothing.

She scheduled me for first thing Friday morning.

I parked myself, like a potted plant, near the phone at 7:45 a.m. My 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. window passed and no tech. I called – nothing had ever been scheduled. My blood began to boil, and it wasn’t just the furnace that was running non-stop as it was so cold outside.

At that point, I abandoned all ladylike mannerisms I’d every possessed and told my ISP that I had an assignment to get done and could wait no longer.

I was told Saturday morning was the next availability for a service call and that infuriated me. I called around, garnering alot of chatter and promises and the runaround for the next few hours. I made and received at least 20 calls over the course of the day Friday. I documented each person’s name that I spoke to and was mentally categorizing them into “very helpful”, “helpful” and “not so helpful” and I was starting to feel like Jack Lemmon’s character, George Kellerman, in “The Out of Towners”.

My second tech arrived at 5:30 p.m. He had to scramble underneath the dropped ceiling to find the wires, went back outside and examined the outside wires, then popped his head in the door and announced “going out to the pole – don’t know when I’ll be back”, so this time I headed back upstairs. Before the ordeal was over, he discovered there was a software glitch on the pole. He summoned a computer tech who turned on a floodlight as darkness had settled in. He was hoisted up in the bucket and fixed the problem in a matter of minutes.

Finally … I was back online, but only to be overwhelmed with a slew of work e-mails from my boss that had accrued while I was whiling away the hours in the pre-World Wide Web days. Can we live without the internet? I dunno, but on those days when there are big-time computer hiccups, I know I am willing to go back to the quill pen.

Old Man Winter is kickin’ out the hits, more than the late DJs Gary Owens and Casey Kasem. But now the warm-weather states got a taste of Winter with ice and snow. My friend Evelyn who lives in Virginia, whom I mentioned in my post on Saturday, enjoyed a day off from work after Richmond got 8 inches of snow. She texted me, eager to show off her icicles which were lined up in a row and already starting to drip. All my school buddies who have moved to warmer climates posted photos on their respective Facebook walls to show the ice and snow on their decks and in and around their yards as well. Just the other day, a South Carolina pal spoke about her honeysuckle bush that had bloomed and the frogs that were already croaking in the nearby creek. I must admit I was jealous for that weather – but not for what they are dealing with now. Southeast Michigan enjoyed a weather break today – it got to 20 degrees! Just perfect for trotting out and grabbing yourself a fad-laden, wonderful-tasting paczki for Fat Tuesday if you were so inclined. Some people were lined up as early as 3:00 a.m. for these delectable goodies.

A week of walks has gone down the drain due to the relentless cold weather. However, I have calculated that all the trips I’ve made up and down the stairs washing little loads of laundry to warm the pipes, dashing around the house to ensure the faucets are dribbling out tiny trickles of warm water, and opening and closing the cupboard doors that hide all the pipes should surely count for at least a mile or more.

I’m thinking about my pals in the North East portion of the United States as they grit their teeth and deal with the fourth snowstorm in as many weeks … and, a blizzard to boot. However do they do it? I just went to “Google Images” to see what those heavy-duty beauty snow melters they are using in Boston look like since I keep hearing about them on the national news.

Incredibly, Jack Frost left his calling card on the inside of my steel side door this morning. There was a pattern of frost slowly climbing up from the bottom, despite my having put barriers nearby to thwart drafts.

I dashed out of the house, pausing for a nanosecond to glance at my neighbor Marge’s outdoor thermometer and saw that the arrow hovered between -10 and 0. Brrrrrrrrrrr.

I ran the car, which started up quickly thanks to the new battery, then quickly exited the garage to escape the exhaust fumes that threatened to choke me. I slipped around the other side of the house to check the furnace pipe for icicles. The neighborhood at 9:00 a.m. looked just about as cold and barren as Siberia – the only activity was the smoke curling out of the chimneys and the dancing shadows that were made since the sun was up and out. That few minutes in which I had to remove my heavy gloves to lock up the garage door left my fingers feeling frigid and I beat it as quick as a bunny back into the house.

Through chattering teeth and with my frozen fingers wrapped around a steaming cup of English Toffee Cappuccino, I acknowledged how grateful I am for a warm home in which to hang my hat. Speaking of hats and caps, I’ve reverted to the Sherpa cap due to this extreme cold. Hey, it looks funny but it warms my ears and my head and rests just so on my eyeglasses.

The one thing I miss about wearing contact lenses, is how your eyeglasses steam up when you get back indoors. You either wait a couple of minutes for them to clear or you need to swipe ‘em off with a paper towel. Why doesn’t someone come up with the equivalent of windshield wipers for eyeglasses to use in the cold weather?

As I was sipping my hot drink my fingers finally started to thaw out, courtesy of that oversized mug, and, happily the gears in my brain started to rev up once again. That got me wondering what the Winter equivalent of “Dog Days of Summer” would be? We all bemoan those sticky, hot days in August … but, oh how we would love to be complaining about that sickening sticky heat now – of course we all say we won’t complain one bit about the hot weather … but you know come August we will. Stay warm everyone.

Well, you couldn’t ask for better weather for Valentine’s Day on this frigid cold February 14th – it’s the perfect excuse to cuddle up with your main squeeze to stay warm.

Maybe you’ll even go a little crazy and wear woolen socks to bed. (And then again, maybe not ….)

I have a friend who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She e-mailed me yesterday, all excited about a package that was just delivered at the law office where she works. No – it wasn’t a dozen roses from her husband. It wasn’t even a gift of delectable Shari’s Berries. It was a box filled with skeins of alpaca wool. That fuzzy wool was a present to herself, long on back order, since she visited an alpaca farm last Fall during that City’s annual Fiber Festival.

Evelyn’s hobby is knitting as you may have guessed. She knits non-stop every chance she gets, trying to make up for lost time for the 50-plus years or so that she never-ever picked up a pair of knitting needles. Now it seems she doesn’t want to put them down. Felted purses are her specialty and she even has a small outlet to sell them, but she knits clothing as well. She is good-hearted and will make prayer shawls for those in need at her church, or knitted caps for chemo patients at the local hospital.

Evelyn was excited about the arrival of the wool, since she said the weather in Richmond was conducive for staying indoors this weekend – after all, it was going to be below the freezing mark. Hmmmm. I didn’t want to say that our temps were going to be sub-zero with a -30 wind chill, because, quite frankly … that might sound like I was bragging. I sure didn’t think this brutal weather was anything worth bragging about, so I just said – “that’ll be nice” and let it go at that. I wasn’t about to burst her bubble, because – boy was she excited about this alpaca wool. Back in the day, my mom would be equally excited when she found wool in a color or texture that she really liked and she’d have to find a pattern right away for it. She loved to knit and churned out baby outfits, sweaters and hat and scarf set for as long as I remember, but she knit one afghan too many and ended up with carpal tunnel syndrome in both hands, so that was the demise of her needlework.

Now, I could’ve even spun a yarn and told Evelyn all about a worrisome woolen, but I kept that fuzzy fiber saga to myself, but I will share that funny little Valentine’s Day tale here with you instead.

I cannot help but think of my mother as her birthday was on Valentine’s Day. She would have turned 89 years old today. Her grade school picture above was taken in the 1930s. I chose this photo as I like how the photographer enhanced the picture to give her reddish lips and cheeks when she was just a mere schoolgirl.

I think when people have a holiday birthday, they often get done out. Their special day gets taken out of the limelight in favor of “the big holiday”. And, so it was with my mom as well. I don’t recall my father ever treating her with candy or flowers on this day specially geared for sweethearts – perhaps it might have been a perfunctory peck on the cheek and wishing her “happy birthday” and handing her a present, but that was about it.

So, when I started working, I tried to make her Valentine’s Day birthday just a little more special. She really wasn’t much of a chocoholic, so I’d stop at the Fanny Farmer Candy Shoppe downtown to buy a large bag of heart-shaped cherry gumdrops every year for as long as I can remember.

For Mom’s birthday, I usually bought her jewelry or clothing, but one year I was shopping at Fisher’s, a small women’s clothing store which eventually went out of business. I saw a beautiful raspberry-colored cashmere sweater on the rack. Luckily, the only one left was just her size. It was so soft that I hated to turn it loose to the cashier to ring it up. I bought some special hearts-n-flowers wrapping paper to make the gift more special.

Well, she just loved that sweater with its loosely tied bow in front – first she held it up to admire it, then slipped that sweater over her head and modelled it in front of the mirror, all the while turning this way and that. I saw her keep scratching a little on her neck, then she loosened the softly tied bow at the front and said “the furnace kicked on – this sweater is really warm and I’ve got to take it off.”

In the next breath, she insisted I wear it to work that day to look festive for Valentine’s Day, before she “stretched it out” and it wouldn’t fit right on me then. That little remark of “stretching it out” was a longstanding joke between us. Whenever she got a new sweater, she’d always let me wear it when it was brand new, otherwise she would stretch it out too much in front with her ample chest. I, however, was quite deficient in that category, so I therefore got first “dibs” to wear any of her brand-new sweaters.

I picked a plain navy blue pleated skirt to go with that raspberry-red sweater and added a few gold heart scatter pins and my heart-shaped earrings, then, feeling fully decked out and very festive for the holiday, I put my hat and coat on and hurried to catch the bus so I wouldn’t arrive late at work.

Upon arriving at work, I shrugged out of my coat, smugly thinking how festive I looked for Valentine’s Day, and, being the very vain young woman I was in those days, I hoped I had enough time to prance around and show off that beautiful sweater before I had to sit down and start working.

But, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a trail of pinky-red fuzz travelling down the front of my skirt. Then, soon thereafter there was another conglomeration of that funky fuzz near the hemline. When I tried to pluck it off, there was more furry frustration as little hairs from my sweater sleeve quickly glommed onto the navy blue skirt’s nubby fibers.

I was getting annoyed as it seemed I could merely stand still and those festive-colored fibers were floating around like delicate dandelion puffs that go to seed and go airborne, landing on everything in sight.

I hightailed it to my desk, jerked open the deep bottom drawer and took out the large sticky lint roller that I kept in there. Hurriedly I slicked off nearly half a roll of that flypaper-like substance to attract the fuzzy fibers, which, by now, were flying fast and furiously around me the more I exerted myself.

And … itchy! That sweater’s fibers soon began to make my neck and arms itch like crazy. I felt like I wanted to crawl out of my clothes, and maybe out of my skin as well.

But that wasn’t the worst of it ….

Clearly those furry little fibers were about to become the bane of my existence when one landed in my eye and quickly embedded itself behind one of my hard contact lenses. I was already fitful enough over this fiber fiasco, but soon I was sporting one eye and one cheek streaked with black splotches from mascara since my one eye was tearing so badly. Feverishly, I tried to find and remove the offending sweater hair that had landed between my eyeball and the contact lens. If you’ve ever worn hard contact lenses and gotten a piece of fuzz lodged in your eye, you can surely share my pain. It would cut like a knife ‘til you could retrieve the fuzz. Ow!!

I grabbed a mirror and plopped down on my black wool desk chair to remove the lens. As I hunched over my desk, one of the secretaries came by, patted my shoulder and asked if I was okay. Her hand came away with raspberry tinted fibers just as the words “what in the world is all over your desk chair?” came out of her mouth. I turned my black-streaked face around and immediately saw my chair was covered from top to bottom with raspberry-colored angora fibers. I growled back that I was “okay kinda sorta” then very grudgingly slipped on a pair of spare eyeglasses I kept in a desk drawer, all the while wishing I had a spare set of clothes at work at well.

I finished off the last sticky squares of the lint roller and cast it aside and I knew I had to now resort to my scotch tape dispenser on my desk as I scrambled to just deal with the fibers which seemed to float and dance around me, in a kind of raspberry aura as I walked down the hall.

It was certainly one long day and one of the most-miserable I have ever spent at work. I couldn’t wait to get home and shed the sweater and rid myself of the pinky-red halo that seemed to envelop me all Valentine’s Day long. I removed the sweater and said “here” and handed it over and proceeded to tell my tale of woe. Mom said “well, maybe I’ll just keep it for special occasions, do you think?”

I know for a fact that sweater never saw the light of day again.

Warm and fuzzy moments – sharin’ the love by sharin’ a sweater would’ve been an idea better left on paper … that time anyway.