Blink, and Spring is Over

It may not look like it to my friends from Arizona and California, but it has been a early spring in Minnesota, as seen in these photos of my yard, taken just moments ago. With daffodils already largely faded and tulips in full bloom, this represents is a pretty advanced state of affairs for an April 26 in Minneapolis.

To appreciate a Minnesota spring, you have to keep your eyes open practically to the point of foregoing sleep, as it arrives and is over in just about a blink of an eye.You can quite literally go to sleep one night with mere buds on the trees, and wake up the next morning to open leaves.

 I sometimes say to outsiders that a Minnesota spring, while beautiful, is about ten days long. This is only a slight exaggeration, as we indeed have had years where the temperatures shift from below zero to the mid 80s in the space of 10 days (It happened one year in the mid 1980s).

As evidence of this, I offer three shots of the same front yard—although taken in different years, they represent the same yard on an April 15, an April 25, and an April 30.

Only today I hung my winter coats in the spare closet upstairs. Tomorrow, I'll be firing up the air-conditioner.

Happy spring, Geezers.

We're Back.....

I owe a thanks to Geo for reminding me how long its been since we've posted here. No, we have not closed down Geezers. The truth is that your fearless editor has seen a number of life changes, some good, some not so good, but in concert, these have greatly distracted me from the all-important work of entertaining and educating approximately 2,537,666 rabid followers of these pages.

Of the many issues distracting your editor and the other Geezers:

• A political season that is simply guaranteed to demoralize any self-respecting Geezer. What can you say when its almost certain that our next President will be Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, or Donald Trump?  It's a horrifying state of affairs, to be sure—too absurd to even satirize, I'm afraid.

• The death of your editor's father-in-law. My wife's father lived a fine life until age 90, but a death in the family is a difficult thing in any circumstance, and in our case it also involves coaxing an aging mother-in-law out of an unmanageable house—a home that  has served as repository for some 3 million plus knick-knacks and items of paraphernalia, each of which must be pried from her grasp. A considerable amount of time recently has beens spent doing plumbing, masonry work, and light carpentry in preparation for selling the old gal's house.

• A good friend struggling with cancer, which certainly occupies some degree of your editor's thoughts. Best wishes to Sehr Wenig, who you may recall reading here in the past, publishing some fine pieces as the only Dame Geezer to grace these pages. She is actually doing some rather fine writing these days as she makes her way through the midst of the chemo phase of treatment, and perhaps can be coaxed back onto Geezers to share some of her experiences.

• A change in your editor's employment status. After 31 years of office-based and executive work of a moderately high level, I've now cut my working hours in half and am working from home. You might think that this would give me all the time in the world to grace the Geezer world with wisdom, but in reality I've found such enjoyment in gardening, a return to true editing, hanging out at the gym with the other old men, and otherwise practicing simple enjoyment of life, that the pull of Geezers has taken a back seat of late.

But enough of such relaxed laziness. I am far too early in the Geezer years to neglect the public any longer by puttering around, so with this notice, I promise that the world shall hear from the Geezers on a regular basis from here on, until the end of time or the end of Donald Trump's second term as President, whichever comes first.

....No,  please.....that's enough applause.  You embarrass us.