Hello again blog faithful, and let me begin with a sincere apology. I did not get my weekly installment posted yesterday, on what is supposed to be Thursday Blog Day. To compound that mistake, I actually had some of it written on Wednesday (I trashed that and am starting over here) because I knew what was in store for Thursday and was afraid I’d never have a chance to write. I was correct, and I missed the mark. I hope it was worth the wait, but that’s not for me to declare or decide.
Happy Thursday Blog Day everyone, except this one is actually being written on Wednesday Blog Day. We have a 9:00 am flight to Orlando on the docket tomorrow, so I’m writing this brief installment a day early (to get the worm?) We’ll be heading down to spend the weekend with Barbara’s sister Kitty, who you may remember from her starring role in “Bob And Kitty Go To Scotland” last fall. We’ll be hanging out with her, her son Todd, his wife Angie, and their adorable incredible totally scrunchable twin daughters, Bella and Stassi (or Stassy, or Stassie, or however you spell the shorted version of Anastasia, but not Stazzie because that would just be wrong.) Those two are growing so fast it wouldn’t surprise me if they picked us up at the airport, in their own car. It might be a little battery operated Barbie Corvette, but still…
So here we are again, on yet another Thursday Blog Day, and I’m going to get right to the fun part first. All of you who have read my book “Bats, Balls, & Burnouts” should recognize the name Pete Delkus. He’s all through the book, starting with the fact that he wrote one of the two “Foreward” sections for it (along with Del Worsham). After that, he appears regularly as a former teammate and roommate of mine, who became a very close friend. He is currently the Chief Meteorologist for WFAA TV in Dallas.
Just when most of us up here in Minnesota were convinced winter would never end, spring arrived like an express train. We went from a blizzard to 70-degrees and sunny in a matter of just a few days and haven’t looked back since. Even the giant mountains of snow in the shopping center parking lots, which were 20 feet tall and hundreds of feet long at one point, are gone. You can still see the outlines of them by looking for unusual amounts of gravel they leave behind like receding glaciers, but the snow is gone. And now, everything is blooming. What a stunning change in such a short amount of time. One week ago, on this blog, I was raving about finally being in the upper 50s and low 60s. We’ve hit 80 a couple of times in the course of this week. Buds are turning to leaves, everything is popping, and pollen is a constant.