Some have said that I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to rollercoasters.

I can’t really deny this particular claim – if anything, I try to embrace it in an effort to avoid finding myself staring down the business end of a 90-degree vertical drop from 200 feet up in the air!  I mean, I can handle Disney coasters – anything with small to moderate drops where I’m greeted by singing animals at the bottom is fine, but none of this upside-down, loop-de-loop, plunging into the bowels of hell nonsense … feel free to just go on ahead without me and I’ll meet you later at the snow cone cart down the street once you’re done taunting the fates and all…

Of course, I don’t have to tell you that the weather around here lately hasn’t been much better than one of those crazy rollercoasters that I work so hard to avoid – one day it’s sunny and 75 degrees out, the next it’s plummeting down into the 40s and I’m scrambling for my winter jacket like it’s the only thing that can save me from the triple inverted loops over the completely harmless cheetah enclosure! Just when I flip the central air back over to AC and think that the worst is behind us, I’m pulling out blankets once again and looking for things to burn for warmth – all the while, my sinuses don’t know whether they’re coming or going!

And the thing is, I don’t really do well in cold weather. Sure, I may have been exposed to all sorts of horrible blizzard-like conditions when I lived up in Michigan, but not for nothing … that’s one of the reasons that I left! Being cold isn’t “fun” for me – I’m not one of these weirdoes who loves wearing snuggly sweaters and enjoying the crispness in the air. On the contrary, I prefer my air to be warm and inviting and particularly not frozen, which under normal conditions would be perfectly reasonable to expect from The Sunshine State of Florida.

Instead, though, right now we’ve got this topsy-turvy weather that just makes me want to curl up into a ball and wait for it all to be over … not unlike the last time my wife persuaded me to “go ride some real rollercoasters” with her at one of our other local theme parks that expressly doesn’t wish me a magical day when I come through the front gates!  It’s honestly a wonder that I manage to get any writing done at all during times like this – between the infrequent highs and the bone chilling, flu-beckoning lows, my creative process eventually pretty much just stops functioning altogether … presumably because my body thinks that there are more important survival tactics that I should be focusing on at that point than writing jokes about New Years Resolutions and the magical healing powers of HoneyBaked Ham!

Right now my only consolation is that if these crazy climate conditions continue to resemble the daunting loops and spins that yours truly ever so passionately loves to hate, then by my calculations we should be just about nearing the end of this frigid journey with sunshine and solid ground popping up over the horizon any minute now.  We’ve done the upside-down loop that cost me a lot of Kleenexes, but overall wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked, we’ve suffered through the mind-numbing corkscrew that plunged us into darkness and sub-freezing temperatures without a moment’s notice, and by now we’ve even endured the hair-raising death drop that left your narrator here laid up in bed for the better part of the New Years holiday weekend.  Any minute now … barring any ridiculous, last-minute theatrics, of course, this crazy train of ours should be coming to a complete stop and, once the floor boards have been replaced, we should all be free to remove the shoulder restraints and exit the ride area back to temperatures that are a little more “stable” and not nearly as “hypothermia-inducing,” to say the least.

Any minute now, the nightmares of this wicked winter gone mad should all be behind us, and it’ll be sunshine and unicorns from here on out … I promise!

Well, that is until hurricane season starts up in a few months, anyways…