On Saturday morning I will run a very big race in Jacksonville — the River Run. It’s a 9.3-mile jaunt that attracts thousands of runners. I’ve been doing it for years, but last year I missed it for a conference. This year I wasn’t about to let the same thing happen — even though the race and the conference fall on the same weekend. So — since I lack any realistic grasp of time — I’ll run the race then fly out for the conference. Only four hours separate the two. It will take surgical precision and military-like agility to pull this off. I’m not entirely confident I can do it, but if I do, this is how it will go down: 5 a.m. – I am referring to this as zero hour because the likelihood that I will actually wake up at 5 a.m. is zero. When the alarm clock goes off, I’ll curse it before hitting the snooze button. Zero hour will be delayed. 5:15 a.m. – The new zero hour.

“That’s it,” I barked. “I don’t care how old you are, you’re going back on the Gentle Leader until you learn how to walk like a lady.” “Oh no, really?” my wife said. “Oh yeah,” I answered. “It’s time she finally starts acting like a civilized mongrel.” Harumph! The lady, of course, is a dog — my dog. A wonderful dog, by most accounts, but one who often treats a walk as an opportunity to see if she can pop my arm out of socket. Not every walk. Many are nice, quiet strolls where she leisurely sniffs and befouls the neighborhood like a good animal.

“What was it like living through the 80s, Brian?” read the writing on the whiteboard. Grrrrr! Those darn college kids. Little whipper-snappers. Children of the — gasp! — 90s. Nineties?!? Can that be right? Did they — gulp! — did they really grow up in the 90s? The dry-erase board with the cutesy, sarcastic little question written on it snickered at me. So did the students gathered around the office of the student newspaper that I advise. “Har, har,” I grumbled at them as they gazed at this “dinosaur” — me — squinting his tired eyes to read the board. “Yes, I have worn parachute pants and they’re actually quite comfortable.” Little buggers, asking me what it was like living through the 80s?!?

Punxsutawney Phil, you over-hyped weather rat. You let us down. You dampened our spirits. You … ahhh, why do we care whether an over-sized groundhog sees his shadow any way? I shouldn’t blame poor Phillip. We’re smart people. We know better than to put our good faith in the hands of over-fed marmots. You know, I’ve heard groundhogs are also referred to as land-beavers or whistle-pigs, and you should never trust anything called a whistle-pig. But we want to believe. We want to think that the groundhog might just be able to dispose of this gloomy time of year. That time when even we bright and cheery Floridians — normally drenched in a cocktail of sun — start to doubt whether the shiny stuff will ever re-emerge. We wonder why we’ve been forsaken and yell out at the heavens: “We’re lookin’ like cave fish down here, oh Lord. Bring us back our rays!” When the clouds don’t break and worse, torture us with a tinkling of monotonous drizzle that has plagued us the past week, we turn to critters who look like they should lay off the carbs. Why? Because we want hope — to make a clean break with winter and get jiggy with spring. Remember spring? That time of year when wilted and frost-burned vegetation sparks back to life and drowns us in heaps of lung-choking pollen?

Terror. Absolute terror. That’s the only way to describe it. I was sitting at my desk, waiting in pained anticipation for the moment when my voice would come across the radio, and I was dreading it. Nobody likes to hear the sound of their voice. You know, their “true” voice. Not the one we hear everyday in our own heads — the one that sounds like “us” to us. I’m talking about our REAL voice — the one everyone else hears. The one that makes us recoil and cringe in pain if it’s ever played to us on a recording. It always sounds so strange, so alien, so unusual and, well, like we should be wearing pocket protectors and saying things like, “the square roots of integers are always irrational, unless of course they’re perfect squares.” Not to mention I’m nasally. Oh sure, you say, we all are, but I sound like I’ve got a bushel of cotton stuffed up the old nasal passageways. And it’s possible I do.

Save the Floridians. We’re freezing! “You liar!” I barked at the sleek digital thermometer, which sat comfy and cozy inside my kitchen. It didn’t even have to brave the weather outside to tell how cold it was. A little rat tail with a temperature probe poked out the window doing the dirty work for it. How lazy! I stared at it — shocked, but unconvinced. “You drunken monkey,” I scolded it. “You must have your numbers backwards.” Thirty eight it read … in the middle of the day. THIRTY EIGHT! That was the high! That’s just a few notches above freezing, and small consolation for my poor plants outside which looked like they had all spontaneously combusted in this unprecedented Florida cold snap. Let me remind you what we already know: We live in Florida. The Sunshine State. Where flip-flops are the state shoe, and possibly their own religion. Most households here only have a single sweater to wear between them, and usually it has a clump of fake plastic holly on the front — a gift from a cold-weather aunt up north.

“Trust Janet,” he said. “Janet won’t steer us wrong. Janet knows what she’s doing. Janet knows the way.” “Harumph,” I mumbled, arms crossed as I threw myself back into the seat. “Janet’s going to drive us to Kansas … through a lake.” Janet is the GPS navigation system that sits on the dash of my wife’s cousin’s husband’s SUV. I don’t know if Janet is her real name or just the name they gave her, but she speaks in a very soft, sophisticated and (frankly) uppity voice as she politely dishes out directions to here and there. “You are approaching the intersection. Turn right.”