221113 Oh no!

If today is a foretelling to what is coming up, this could be a cold, harsh winter.

I think winter has arrived a month early this year.

I can almost see my electric meter spinning like a hard disk on a computer (fast, very fast.) I’ve been cold all summer long and now I am facing an extra cold winter, where is the justice in that? It has been said that growing old is not for sissies. I suppose I can see that now, besides all the old age aches and pains we elders have to face being cold all year round. I can remember when in the middle of the winter only sissies would button their coats and we boys wet down our hair before leaving for school just to add to our already coolness. We chuckled at old people being cold and wearing heavy coats with scarves around their necks. Now I see that Karma is really true and it’s not a misspelling of a car mechanic. I think Karma may be a beach in south Florida.

It’s cold enough to freeze the balls on a brass monkey outside. I know that sounds naughty, but it is actually an old seafaring quip. Back in the days of sailing ships, a monkey was a square iron pan bolted to the wooden deck and cannon balls were stacked in the monkey. When it got really cold the cannon balls would freeze together and sailors were in a pickle if those cannons were needed to engage an enemy ship. The solution was to make the monkey out of brass and then the balls wouldn’t freeze to the monkey. Therefore if it could get cold enough to freeze the balls to a brass monkey it was very cold indeed. Now that is a sea story and I wasn’t there to confirm or deny. The story did not begin with “This is no shit” so in sailor parlance it could be a false story because it didn’t begin with the aforementioned phrase in quotations above. A sailor never lies when the quoted phrase begins with the above quoted remarks.