A Hazy Shade of Winter. 03/06/26

I was away last week in the Galapagos Islands. While my wife and I were basking in the sun and snorkeling, the rest of my family got hit with another blizzard, this time with 22” of snow. Supposedly worse than the one a few weeks ago. The Hudson River was completely frozen over. Dirty roadside snowbanks, black ice, we hadn’t seen anything this severe in years. So what’s a team of comic maker uppers to do? A two-part series on having the winter blues. The Who sang, “There ain’t no cure for the summertime blues,” but I prefer to complain about the winter. So we wrote about winter blues and I come back and what happens? A warming trend, that’s what. No more ice in the Hudson. That baby’s flowing the way it was intended to flow. And next week? Next week? The high temperatures from Sunday through Wednesday are 60°, 65°, 68° and 71°. 71°??? Who has winter blues when it’s 71°?

Nonetheless your trusted comic guys wrote about the winter. Who would have predicted shorts weather? Neither of us claims to be Nostradamus here. We barely know how to spell Nostradamus (spell check helped). So the first comic was about where Al and Joanne should go. The second one was about a hot tub. Let’s stop right there. I love hot tubs. Love them. About 20 yeas ago we lived in a house with a deck and backyard, but after a couple decades of use, including kid’s birthday parties, an engagement party, etc, an architect friend attended and said he thought the deck was unstable and needed to be replaced. Damn. But out of necessity sometimes comes opportunity. Such as, if we need to replace the deck, what about sinking a hot tub into it? It was an immediate hit. I used to go out there at night to see the stars and I even used it all winter, when I had to trudge a short path through snow. But there’s something magical about cold air outside and the steam rising from the hot tub, beckoning you (okay, me) to get in here and relax. It was the perfect respite for my daughter after she finished running the NY Marathon one year.

I loved that hot tub, and when it came time to move out of our house and downsize to an apartment, I told the buyers of our house, “Look, it even comes with a hot tub.” They said, “We don’t want the hot tub.” I was so incensed I wanted to cancel the sale but my wife reminded me we had already signed the papers, so…

The kicker was that I had to PAY to get the tub removed. That’s right. A mover had to take all the fencing off the deck, move a heavy truck onto the lawn, thereby destroying part of it, and then hydraulically lift the tub up and over the deck, never to be seen again. Sigh. So that’s it for this week. Now that we’re done with the blog, I’ll jump in the hot tub. At least I would if I had one. So we’ll let Al and Joanne enjoy it instead.

Have a great weekend,

Andy and John