A cold, lonely season

This just in, everyone: I am getting really tired of winter.

Remember the good old days of summer? This weekend's weather made it seem like a thousand years ago. You've read it all here before: subzero cold, high winds, wind chill readings you normally associate with the Canadian arctic. In fact, that's where all this stuff came from.

The cold front blew through here Saturday evening, and temperatures plummeted. It got all the way up to -5F (-21C) for a high today, and the wind chill is dying down. Right now, it's "up" to -28F (-33F). Earlier today, it was at -40F (-40C). We didn't get much snow from it, but the snow that came got whipped up into big drifts--they had blizzard conditions in parts of the U.P. along Lake Superior, and some roads were shut down, as was the Mackinac Bridge. I had to climb over several big snowdrifts to get to the office today.

It's Feb. 10, so I think/pray this is the worst of it and that the weather will get better from here. I'm no big fan of winter, anyway.

About as brutal is the pace of high school sports this winter. Somehow, the season got condensed by one week--same number of games, but less time to play them all. And the weather has been rough, knocking the stuffing out of schedules. I've been out as much as four nights a week to cover high school basketball.

Fortunately, there does seem to be light at the end of the tunnel. The tournament season is coming quickly. While one or two of the teams I cover may advance, most won't, and my workload will start falling off quickly by the end of February. At last, I'll be able to spend some time at home! By mid-March, everything wil be over.

Then it goes from one extreme to the other--no high school sports for a month and a half, or whenever the snow melts and the grass grows enough to allow track, tennis and golf. We're up north, remember, and spring gets here late--track and golf won't get going until late April, if then.

Haven't heard from S for a while. She said she was suffering from dizzy spells after her operation and was going to check with her doctor about it.

The Wisconsin primary is coming up next week, and my mom is interested in voting. I called the city clerk where the nursing home is located, to make sure she will be on the list when they go to the nursing home to help the residents vote. She really likes Hillary Clinton; I'm not so wild about her, but it will make her feel happy to cast a vote for her.

The last bit of news is about the search for a new cat. I've been getting antsy to get another one; I miss having one I can play with and pet. Late last week, I was looking at a local daily paper while waiting for a basketball game to start, and I saw the ad from the local shelter, with pictures of the cats they currently have. They also have a website that shows the kitties.

I took that paper home and showed it to my wife. That particular shelter is about an hour away, but we have a shelter in town, and we agreed to visit it Saturday afternoon, before the wind changed and the arctic barged in.

We agreed beforehand that we wouldn't take any of them home with us--we have some clean-up work associated with the old cat that needs to be done before introducing a new cat. So this was a scouting trip.

We looked the cats and kitties over, made a few mental notes, took a couple pictures and talked about it all later. I think my wife wants to see the cats in the shelter north of Iron Mountain, the ones in the paper.

It was a little sad--going to the local shelter, seeing all the cats meowing and trying to get your attention, reaching out with their paws, rubbing themselves against your fingers, licking your fingers ... and then not leaving with one. (We did not dare pick any of them up; it would have been impossible to tear ourselves away after the initial stages of bonding.)

Of course, I would have been quite happy to take about a half dozen of them home. I like cats.

We didn't get one on Saturday. Next time, though, may be the big day. I'm really looking forward to that. It's the day when spring arrives in my heart.

Because it's really cold and lonely now. I'm missing Frisky a lot.