Another Hallowhog draws to a close

It seems like only yesterday I was sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch of my new house, passing out candy and toys to kids and the occasional grown-up. Today it is Groundhog Day, and Punxatawney Phil either saw his shadow or didn't see his shadow, which means that we will have either an early Spring of six more weeks of Winter, I forget which. So now we pack away our Hallowhog streamers and noisemakers and rim-toodlers and prepare for the grim late-Winter Valentine's Day holiday, followed 30 days later by the somewhat less grim St. Patrick's Day.

So how will we remember this Hallowhog? Locally it was certainly one of the warmest Hallowhogs in recent memory, starting with an unnaturally warm Halloween and ending with about ten days of inch-at-a-time snowfalls every third day. (We're currently getting the heaviest of these; there's maybe two inches of very slippery snow out there, and it was a bit of a white-knuckled 33 mile commute home.) It was a Hallowhog that saw the end (for now) of Republican control of Congress, and a State of the Union address that was actually pretty enjoyable and was full of ideas that would have been good ideas if they had been presented six years ago, but now fall into the "too little, too late" category. This Hallowhog saw the word "surge" enter the daily vocabulary of newscasts (I have heard recent references to surges of roadside bombings in Iraq and surges of snow flurries), and it witnessed the greatest panic caused by aliens from outer space since the Orson Welles broadcast of "War of the Worlds".

And, to paraphrase Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day" , nobody I knew died this Hallowhog. Three whole months plus a few days, and no family members, friends, or pets died. Something of a record, I think.

So I guess it was a pretty good Hallowhog.