All of you who've been complaining about the heat and the hot weather and the sweat and the high temperatures and how hard it is to fall asleep when temperatures are not even in the 90s, I hope you're happy.
Fall is here. Thanks a lot.
Oh don't worry about me, just another one of the frail elderly who gazes sadly at the calendar on the wall and wonders if he can once again survive all those upcoming months ending in "er" and "ry." They add up to a whole lotta months or the rest of my life, whichever comes first.
No worries. Don't you fret about me for even a minute.
I probably have a pair of thick socks I can get out of storage. In the meantime you go ahead and enjoy yourself and all your hayrides and pumpkin latte spice aroma room spray fresheners and Christmas carols on the sound systems in every store. I'll be home watching one of those ten-hour YouTube videos of a fake fire in a rustic fireplace while dreaming about owning a parka.
Fall means football is back on TV following a three week break that took up most of July. Strikes Two and Two-and a-half.
I hate Winter the way I used to hate the Yankees. When I was 12 I had to deliver, door-to-door, 57 copies a day of the Cleveland Press around my far-flung neighborhood in sub-zero temperatures. I probably have PTSD.
I hate Winter, and to me Fall is just foreplay for those greedy long icicles probing our frostbitten skin deep down to the last remaining embers of thyroid and pituitary warmth. Next stop: an icebox at the county morgue.
But enough whining. You go have fun at Farmer Fudd's Pumpkin Patch Gala Corn Maze. Me, I've seen way too many movies about horrors hidden in cornfields. I wouldn't walk through a corn maze even if Paris Hilton had me by the hand.
Well, you say, Sure it's a little cool in early Fall and then it gets a little cooler in late Fall, but at least it gets dark early so there's none of that loafing around outside in evening summer sunshine sipping gin & tonics and picking through the finger foods.
Nope, it's hearty beef 'n' beet borscht by oil lantern again tonight, then mutton with turnips and alfalfa soup tomorrow. Grandma's Olde Fashioned Succotash Casserole will tide us through the weekend. Next Friday, if we set the alarm we should be able to get to the Early Bird Dinner Special at Denny's unless it's snowing and the roads are closed.
Meals sure are important in Winter months. The cold and dark has a depressing effect on people, so our little family combats the negative emotional impacts of winter by dining on so-called comfort foods.
Trophy the wife keeps it simple. She sits down with a knife and fork, tucks a napkin into her collar, and opens a nice fresh 3 lb. box of See's Candies. I'm on a health kick so I limit myself to a six-pack of Old Milwaukee and a medium-size bag of reduced sodium potato chips.
Winter weather: Such wonderful rainy relief from those hot August afternoons full of blue skies, big clouds and and getting a suntan. Instead we'll have the opportunity to do some things around the house in the late afternoons, like gathering firewood and stoking the fireplace again.
And no more mowing the lawn in 95 degree heat, not when we can enjoy a brisk January afternoon at your brother-in-law's house, patching holes we can't find in the roof while his wife puts empty buckets around the bedrooms.
Go for a Fall or Winter walk? Why not? What's not to enjoy about dark, wet, cold puddle-stomping and dodging cars without headlights? Unless it's slipping on ice and wondering, when you wake up in the hospital, whether you broke some bone(s) or just herniated a lower back disk or two.
At least it's not like when you have spend a weekend morning in July cleaning up all those paper plates and cups from last night's neighborhood barbecue. And what in the world are you going to do with that half-empty keg of Heineken at 9 in the morning?
Now that's a decision you'll never have to face in February.
We're planning to go out to the Mendocino Coast tomorrow because Trophy is all excited to see polar bears frolic on the icebergs. After that we'll go to Jenny's Giant Burger and have a hot, steaming Seal Blubber Sandwich with cheese and extra mayo.
Then home to Ukiah to hunker down and wait for the clocks to get set back, adding more despair to our lives by subtracting more hours from the days.
Nothing to worry about. We'll get those hours back in the summer, exactly when we don't need them.
Tom Hine has long used the TWK byline but until now no one ever requested being written about. Ken Edmonds, a runner-up in the "Hometown Heroes" feature, wishes to also be honored as a County Hero and a State of California Hero. He says he was almost named Most Popular in high school and would have starred in football had it been invented by the time he graduated. In July, 1973 he nearly stopped on 101 to help an old lady with a flat tire. Ken says he'll soon be named Emperor of the Ukiah Lions Club. He is also a notary public, an excellent florist and plays bassoon.
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