Whack-A-Mole: Punxsatawney Phil Better Beware

“Whack-A-Mole: ” by Lynn Rebuck © 2009

Monday morning the sadistic Pennsylvania groundhog saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter.

Suddenly, I felt like playing “Whack-a-Mole.”

I am tired of shoveling four inches of “scattered flurries” off of the driveway.

I feel like we are being duped by the forecasts on the nightly news.

The meteorologists predict snow, we all crowd into the grocery store to stock up on the essentials of life--Tastykakes, Doritos, and People magazine-- and the storm doesn’t show up.

They predict flurries and suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of the next ice age, in an all-out white-out, or hacking through what I call “snice”—a fiendish snow/ice sandwich. It is solid ice on the bottom, fluffy snow in the middle topped with a crunchy layer of ice. It’s a Fluffernutter from hell (if you don’t know what a Fluffernutter is, email me or phone a friend).

I’m pretty sure I found Scrat, frantically attempting to reach an acorn, frozen in a pose in the iceberg that was my driveway last week.

A few years ago I interviewed a broadcast meteorologist who worked for a network television affiliate. He was highly-respected in his field and had started a successful weather forecasting company. He told me that even with all the technological advancements, weather satellites, and Doppler-gadgets, the “science” of predicting the weather was still a 50-50 proposition. “You might as well flip a coin,” he said.

When I shared this story with a friend of mine recently, she said she wished she could have a job where she only had to be right half of the time and could still get paid for it. I advised her to run for political office.

My car has no traction in the snow and it has front-wheel drive. Someone told me to put some dead weight in the trunk, so I put an ex-husband over each wheel.

I bought a cheap snow blower on eBay. It turned out to be a crazy straw.

I really did get a snow blower. It didn’t do a very good job on the driveway but it's great on the highway. Now I drive it to work.

It was hard to learn how to direct the snow when it comes out of the machine. I ended up blowing snow into my neighbor’s driveway. He has a snow blower too, so he just blew it back. Three hours and all we accomplished was the start of another Cold War.

All this cold weather and snow is nature’s response to Al Gore’s summit in D.C. about global warming.

There are good things to be said about winter. Like, um…snakes hibernate. That’s about it.

Well, we’d better break out the shovels—they’re calling for more scattered flurries tonight.

Maybe if we all stand outside and catch the snowflakes on our tongues we won’t have to shovel. © 2009 Lynn Rebuck

Lynn Rebuck writes a weekly humor column for the Lititz Record Express. You can email her at LynnRebuck@live.com.