Thats Just Great, Six More Weeks of Winter

Oh, I'm feeling really sorry for Punxsutawney Phil, the pretentious groundhog employed to do but one simple thing a year, predict the end of winter. Word has it that it was near freezing today in eastern Pennsylvania when the self-important woodchuck decided he'd rather tuck tail and run back into his comfy underground hole than to wait out a continuing winter.

As far as I'm concerned, Phil, you are a disgrace to rodents.

Hey, I'm tired of winter too and I don't have thick fur to keep me warm and don't have a pair of gargantuan front teeth that allow me to gnaw nourishment from the hardened hulls of frozen winter plants. When I chew on things outside this time of year my tongue sticks. What am I, Phil, unimportant to you? Do my circumstances not matter?

I spent Saturday morning chipping ice from my eaves because of this whole winter thing. The troughs are ready to come tumbling down. Do you have ice building up on your stump? Do you burn wood heat in that little den of yours? How many times this year have you been stuck in a snowdrift while heading out to the grocery store? Oh wait, that is right, your handlers jammed you so full of rich nuts and berries in the fall that you've been able to sleep through most of this mess without even having to hit Kroger.

In case you are wondering Phil, my feet have been cold and wet since the beginning of November. We have the sniffles and headaches here, and our lips are chapped. Do you care, Phil? Do woodchuck lips even get chapped? Do you even have lips?

It is several degrees below freezing right now in Michigan, and it's after freaking 1:00 in the afternoon! Yesterday was the first day in nearly a month that we even broke freezing. A bolder variety of groundhog, one raised in the difficult climate of northern Michigan, would be sunning himself here today, maybe resting comfortably atop one of those huge snow drifts that appeared with a western gale over the weekend. He certainly would not be running scared for cover because of his own shadow. Who knows, he might actually straddle that very snow drift and flip off that brood of woosie cousins he has living in Punxsutawney (if you can even call that living.)

That is because Michigan is a land of continuous shadow in winter, shadow caused when sunlight has difficulty penetrating thick banks of snow producing clouds.

Phil, you get a little sunlight in Pennsylvania and retreat in a panic over your own bulbous shadow. I hate to be the one to break it to you Phil, but it might not be throes of winter at all that has you so skittish, it just might be that you simply like to gorge yourself and are ashamed of your body. And, honestly, it sort of cheeses me off to think I've got to suffer another few weeks of this crap simply because you lack the will power to push your pathetic lard ass away from the table.

In any case, next year I hope you either develop some inner fortitude or get yourself on a stair master starting no later than mid-January. Al Gore will certainly need the hysteria and my feet might still be wet.