This column sometimes seems almost irrelevant to me when I get around to writing about what happened in my life a week or two prior. After all, even when I am writing about ‘right now' to me, it still is almost a week before anyone gets to read it. However, since I usually try to have it written a week ahead of time, I have an even greater problem remaining relevant.

I suppose columnists at daily newspapers don't have that problem, but we only come out once a week. While I don't give an account of my every action for the previous week, I do sometimes try to share a feel for some of what's going on. That's only a problem when the topic has something to do with the weather or current events.

Since I was planning on mentioning some of that in this column, I opted to wait until Monday to get started with the writing part. Well, I might have just put it off because I had other things to do, but procrastination isn't something fit to brag about. Not unless you're really good at it.

Any time I put things off, I get caught and end up having work like a mad man in an attempt to catch up. Conversely, a really good procrastinator is able to put things off so efficiently that they either no longer need to be done or someone else (the mythical enabler of which every procrastinator dreams) does the work rather than wait for it to be done by the procrastinating party.

I'm sure that such results lead to the lack of personal satisfaction in a job well done, but they also likely lead to a lot more free time. With an old flat-bottomed boat leaning precarious and lonely beside my building, I'd be more than a little bit interested in finding ways to steal free time as the weather starts to warm up.

Speaking of the weather, it has been the big news since my last column was published. That column actually was written prior to the weekend (and the snow). That column was about me finishing a compilation of O. Henry stories, which had happened about two weeks earlier. I'm currently reading another book of short stories by William Faulkner, but I've not gotten into it far enough to have formed an official opinion. By reputation, he's at least as good as O. Henry, but we'll see if he livens up the bathroom's magazine rack as well.

But the snowfall came early in the week as we were finishing up the newspaper and now I wish I had held that column another week and printed something about the snow. Why? Because it's hard for me to get into the spirit of writing about snow while it is about 75 degrees outside and dry as a bone. The sky is blue, the robins are pulling worms and I've already turned the clock forward.

Granted the first real snowfall of the season, about eight or nine inches, was something worth remembering. I wish we could get more of those myself, I just want them all to come on Thursday night and be gone by Sunday morning. Sadly, weather doesn't work that way.

Being somewhat reluctant to admit my age, I was out during the snow, sliding down the hill on my chest, putting the children on the sled, building a snowman, and taking part in the ritualized snowball fight (the one where no one gets hurt and no one gets hit in the face). The following day, which was Monday, I also enjoyed driving around the county taking snow pictures, admiring the many different breathtaking views that could be found, seemingly around every curve of the road. I sometimes go to the Blue Ridge Parkway to take scene shots, but with a deep snow on, it's not necessary. Unbelievable scenery gets cheap. After the snow was gone, which seemed to happen suddenly on Thursday, the seasons changed abruptly from winter to late spring. This past weekend, we had something akin to summer weather, especially when one considers that we were all facing snow on the ground and 3 degrees just three days earlier.

I usually spend my Saturdays in some sort of a productive pursuit, and this past weekend was no different. I spent most of the day Saturday inside, which seems insane in some ways with the weather like it was. I was outside enough to enjoy the weather some, cleaning the chimney, emptying the stove ashes and cleaning up the yard. However, the majority of my time was spent painting and cleaning out the laundry room, which took better than half of the day.

I had replaced some of the wall board last year and had never gotten around to painting the room. One of the walls was unpainted drywall, the other was white painted drywall, and the others were paneling with a flower wallpaper border on top. By the time I was finished on Saturday, I managed to get at least three of the walls a nice shade of light bluish grey.

I also brought down a large stainless steel shelving unit that I had been storing in my building in order to expand the storage capacity. As I moved things around that day, I found several things that hadn't seen the light of day in many moons, including my giant cast iron frying pan that was deemed 'too heavy' by the resident chef, a food dehydrator and my collection of pottery bowls and mugs. By the time everything was sorted out, the room was nearly as full as it was before I started, even with the additional shelf space. It was almost like everything else just expanded to suck up the room. In the end, I had succeeded at little more than a feeling of accomplishment.
 

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