Sucker punches fade;
These thawing skeletal shards,
the harbingers of rebirth

So . . . last night’s post took me forever to write — like eight hours or so, with the constant diversions of doing my job while sitting in the building’s control center. But the real issue wasn’t working around work, but trying to figure out WordPress’ interface. You see, I haven’t been posting regularly for several years, and so I find myself paying the price of having fallen behind. The interface changed. In a way, it was totally alien from how I was doing it before, and so there is a learning curve there.

Fortunately, I’m starting to figure this thing out, and it looks like I might actually have a few more toys to play with. Building a post, it’s now like stacking Legos, and how much better is that than hacking together html, copying, pasting, etc? It seems like there’s even potential here for site layout design.

I’ll keep digging on that.

But anyway . . .

Believe it or not, Spring is right around the corner. Here in North Dakota, where we have a reputation for cold weather, proper winter didn’t really set in until several weeks ago, and then a couple weeks ago the temps just plummeted. An unseasonably mild winter became car-killing weather, as though Mother Nature jumped, realizing that February had crept up on her and cranked it all the way down to -11.

And the irony of it is, even if we’ve really only had a month or so of bitterest cold, it’s still too long for my taste. I hate cold weather. I’m still not lucky enough to have a home without drafts or cold spots, the window panes have thick layers of frost on them, and even keeping the thermostat at 68 does little to ward off the cold that likes to sink its teeth deep into my flesh.

But I think there’s a sumptuous spring right around the corner. Literally and figuratively, we’re in a position to rebound, to move forward and make things better. Four years of bald-faced political chicanery. Insurrection at the Capitol. No real closure. Winter storms, power outages, water shortages . . . staggering losses. Human losses. Have we had enough yet?

Some people fight change, while others fight for a better tomorrow. It would be nice if it felt like there were more of the latter than the former.

Let’s bounce back. We can make tomorrow even better.