From a friend in Florida.


I don't know about you but I'm getting sick and tired of hearing about how bad the winter is up there. It's on the news 24/7. It's in my email almost daily, often with attached pictures of houses enveloped in white, killer icicles, pets in snow drifts or guys with golf clubs teeing up off a snow bank. Obviously nobody up there has any empathy for the discomforts we face on a daily basis down here. Yesterday it was foggy. Today the temperature is not supposed to go much above 70. And you think you've got problems? And now there's another storm in the Midwest heading for the northeast. This will undoubtedly unleash another torrent of whining and photographing.

I know that when I come off the golf course my email will again be loaded with assorted complaints about snow days, plowing mishaps, shoveling pains and of course pictures of same. I know I'll need at least a short nap to recover from it all. Winter isn't even half over yet. How much more news are we expected to endure without abandoning all electronic communications. But that still leaves our newspaper which also revels in accounts of flight and train delays, buried cars, assorted heart attacks, etc., etc. We can't give up reading the paper -- there are coupons almost every day.

All I ask is a little sympathy. Before you complain about the fact that you can't even open your front door, or you fell on your ass (again), please remember that we too are enduring weather. Some days we don't see sun until late afternoon. Some mornings there's actually a light frost on our plants.
I even had to scrape frost off my windshield last week. And I don't own a scraper!

Obviously I could go on and on. But I have a 10:35 tee time. I don't know whether or not I'll need a sweater.