Too Cold To Blog

Not really, but as I age here in Michigan I'm growing less and less fond of living in nature's refrigerator for three months plus out of every year. Carry me back to Key West, please.

Maybe it's just me. Others seem to tolerate colder temperatures better than I. Like my colleague at work with whom I share an office. He runs a fan throughout the year, January included. I sometimes have to add a layer to make up for the extra chill in the air.

Or like my wife Wendy who stripped my favorite fleece sheets off our bed saying it was too hot to sleep with them on. Great, now it's stone cold cotton as the frigid winter's night sets in. I'm prepared for it dressed in warm socks, fleece pajama bottoms and sometimes even a sweatshirt. But I'd rather have my fleece sheets back, especially when my wife wants to warm her cold feet on me under the covers.

The cold sucks whatever energy I can muster up. If I can't hibernate or be one of the snowbirds who go south for the winter (some day!), then I'll retreat to the comfort of my Lazy Boy after work and wrap myself in a blanket while channel surfing to find a monster movie on TV. I envy those with the energy for a brisk winter's walk like the couple who walk their dog past our bedroom window at six in the morning regardless of temperature or wind chill. Brrrrrrrrr.

Meanwhile, I dread going out in the morning to scrape car windows of the frost and ice, then drive to work hoping for the heat to kick in soon enough so that I don't see my breath reflected in the icy fog that freezes on the windshield. Brrrrrrrrr. Doesn't help that even if I've allowed myself extra time to drive the icy roads to work, the driver ahead of me has allowed even more time, white-knuckling it about 20 miles per hour when the speed limit is 55. Just another reason to flee south in early December.

Perhaps the harsh Michigan winters is another reason that the University of Michigan apparently had to settle for their third choice when naming a replacement for former head football coach Rich Rodriguez. If you were Jim Harbaugh, would you move from San Francisco, or Les Miles, would you move from Louisiana? Also, try recruiting blue chip gridiron prospects to play on frozen tundra in November. No, they'd rather play for Auburn, Florida, Alabama, etc.

Yes, Michigan does have a new football coach but my son Greg, who is an usher at the Big House, isn't buoyed by the fact that the new coach's name Brady Hoke rhymes with words like joke and choke. Not the type of fellow to get strike fear into our cross-state rival Michigan State Spartans, let alone Ohio State.

But Hoke also rhymes with smoke. And where there's smoke, there's fire. Michigan could use a little fire right now. I'll take that over cold any day.