Lurching Along Into Late Winter...

Here I am, April 25, and outside, we've got windchills to worry about.

Mind you, those "windchill" numbers are slightly below freezing, as we see it, so when it comes to "is that cold?"  Nah.  It's knee-length shorts weather, not "yank them down before you have some explaining to do" shorts.  Yeah, there are a fair few folks up here in "da norte land" that sometimes lack the propriety that a decent person might rely on to prevent themselves from walking out their front door in a wardrobe choice that would probably result in catcalls and potential criminal charges in some neighborhoods.

But then again, when you spend 9 months of the year considering the layering approach for today's wardrobe, the occasional fashion faux pas that ends up exposing a little more private real estate than originally planned, well, it's about as close as us Midwesterners get to nude beaches.  Because up here in this neck of the woods, the only guarantee you get from a nude beach is mosquitoes who leave you itching in many inappropriate places.  

Now while some folks will see that as baseball season, my mother would probably send me back to put on longer pants.  Then again, she was the one who often did the cutting of my "cut-offs".  One huge benefit of being the oldest and only boy meant none of my younger sisters were really interested in my assorted hand-me-downs.  And among them were some ... well, probably they weren't as cool as I thought they were when I got them, but they were what they were when they were.

I mean, there were the winter jackets I went through, about one a year, on average.  There was the ... well, I think it was probably designed by someone who had once heard a winter coat being described, forgot many of the details, and then they decided to give it a whack.  I am not aware, these days, of many parka-style coats with lapels, but I tell you, back in the 1970s, if it didn't have bell bottoms or lapels, it didn't go anywhere.  And I had to go to school.  So my mother must have gotten one hell of a deal on that corduroy winter coat with a zipper right down the middle of the hood - and big pouch pockets.  And lapels that might have given me lift had I remembered they were there during strong wind storms.

I suppose the first item of clothing that we vividly remember when it comes to a particular type was probably the most traumatizing.  I had winter coats before that corduroy one, but I must have been nine or ten years old then.  What a piece of work.  I recall after that, rather fondly, what my mother called "Berry" Parka.  It had the genuine snorkle hood, which was great for people to torment you when you got on the bus after waiting in below-zero wind-chill.  It took a few minutes for your fingers to warm up enough to dare to open the hood, so you took your life in your hands with your seat choice.  If you sat in front of one of the bullies, they might start "plinking" the back of your head for various reasons, and as nice as those hoods were when keeping the front of your face warm, it was pretty thin padding out back where the kids liked to poke/smack the back of your head.

But that parka had it all, right down to the upper-bicep pocket with zipper and all sorts of other cool stuff.  Then there was the "better defensive" "Ski jacket" which was blaze orange.  My guess is it was a catalog special.  I wanted the ski jacket, hoping to fit in with the cool kids.  Unfortunately, the only thing blaze orange fits in with are the deer hunters, about a month out of the year, and early-winter season, not mid-to-late January.  And oh, by the way, without a hood, you need a hat.  And did I forget to mention my mom loved knitting?  I miss a lot of those hats she made me over the years.  Wish I'd kept them somewhere safe, but I expect my sister who now lives in my mother's last home has had more than a few backyard fires sitting next to them as they burned.  Oh well.  So it goes.

But to get back to the point, you might have forgotten what your hair did when you came into a warm, rather dry building, after wearing a hat made with some form of yarn, and you pulled it off.  That's right.  You didn't need none of those silly static-electricity generators.  You were your own walking free-energy power plant.  Or were until you touched some grounded metal.  And my personal favorite times were the kids who would forget about that, sit in the bus right behind the seat with the heater, so they were nice and warm, in the path of that hot flowing air, then they'd get into the school building and forget to take off their mittens before getting a drink.

Did you ever do that?  That's right.  All that static electricity somehow makes that connection between your nearly-frozen upper lip and the metal spout from the water fountain, the spout that's utterly, firmly grounded via copper plumbing, to the honest-to-God ground.  Yeah.  There are few things that make you tear up faster than all of that amperage flowing through your nose or upper lip to the fountain.  Yeouch.  

But here we are, darned near Mayday - er, May Day, that is - and no blizzards yet.  Some years we get by without one, some years it's like this one is hopefully slouching into the end of winter with some miserable excuses for snowfall, which goes away rather quickly, but then the weather returns to bleeping cold.  I much prefer those years when we get the properly emphatic end-of-winter 90-degree out of nowhere day, followed by rip-roaring noisy (but very limited damage) Thunderstorms, which are then followed by a "where the heck did that come from" double-digit snowfall.  Only about four years ago we got hit by an 18" snowstorm in April as we were preparing to go visit my then-not-yet-late Mother-In-Law. 

Spring in Iowa has been a feature of my life for most of the past 30 years.  I'd visit because my mother-in-law's birthday was a month after my wife's, so we'd get to spend time around Easter in Iowa.  I'd enjoy going into the local farm supply stores and seeing the baby chicks, chirping away under the heat lamps.  I tell you, if you've never had the privilege of going into a hardware store - a good and proper, fully stocked, successful local hardware store, based in farm country, in the spring, you ain't lived properly.

I mean, a few years before that my family and several friends of ours headed down to camp near my wife's childhood stomping grounds.  One of our friends had a problem with one of their camp stoves.  One of the O-rings was missing.  

Now, if you're like me, you hear the phrase "O-Ring" and you're thinking "solid rocket booster, Challenger."  Yeah, I go there.  But in this particular case, the fuel tank was a five-pound propane cylinder - you know, the smallish, short little propane cylinders that fit in backpacks for camping stoves - not much in the way of orbital velocity to be found there, but if you've got a leaking line, that's definitely guaranteed to cause an explosion that might bear some resemblance to devastating consequences.  

But we headed into town, walked into the hardware store, and in ten minutes, we found an entire eight-foot-long section of any size rubber O ring you might need, short of that Solid Rocket Booster size.  I mean, one that could cut the blood flow off in a baby's pinky, all the way up to "fits a tractor".  

Which is I expect why I sometimes find myself unable to locate the specific item I was sure would be available in the store.  I live in a suburb that's about a layer or three in from the nearest full-time-working farm.  So like a few years ago when I expected to be able to walk into a local home improvement store and find a 15" circumference hose clamp, and only found 1/2" to 4" hose clamps, well, that's what you get when you don't do your homework.

So it goes.  But I do enjoy being able to get exactly what it is you need, and I expect I should probably be living further out in the "exurbs" areas, but you know, there's this whole "broadband" thing which I'm just a little addicted to, so there's that little problem.  I keep thinking I can quit whenever I want, then go off down a side street, looking for [HOBBY#83791] information... 

So hopefully, you're warmer and more comfortable than I.  It's time for me to go feed the dogs and fiddle about a bit with another plot twist.  Yeah, I'm writing.  Hopefully, some day, it sees the light of ... well, maybe the bindery of a printer.  Maybe.  I won't grow rich on it.  But it would be nice to see the idea fully fleshed out.