“Oh, Mummy.  Will it ever be springtime again?”

I’m beginning to doubt it.

Just last week when I took the kids to school one morning, it was minus eight degrees. 

Fahrenheit. 

Now that it’s warmed up to a toasty 30, Mother Nature with her wacky, psychotic sense of humor, has decided to give us the usual season’s total snowfall in six days. 

Since last Sunday, my neighborhood has been blessed with over two feet of snow which translates into five-foot snow walls around the perimeter of my property making my home not unlike an igloo.  That also means that since last Sunday, I have been out shoveling at least twice a day. 

There’s not a part of my body that does not hurt and that only counts the parts that have thawed out. 

Central Oregon is well-equipped to deal with snow.  In the last 20 years, the school district has declared a snow day only five times.  The most recent one was yesterday which was also one of the days for high school final exams for my two teenagers. 

Both of them have concluded that this is proof that God does, indeed, not only exist but He loves them profoundly.  They are currently both considering joining the seminary.

I believe this chaos and confusion in the systematic order of things can be attributed to the headline I saw in last Saturday’s newspaper. 

Previously, I thought the funniest sentence ever that I had read in a newspaper was “Obviously, there aren’t enough turkeys to generate enough poop to power a nation.”  You would think that jaunty line would be hard to top but I believe that we have a contender:

“Senators threaten to tinker with stimulus plan.”

One has to wonder if the editors of this fine article considered alternatives.  I would personally dearly love to know what those other choices were considering that “Senators threaten to tinker with stimulus plan” was the best of the lot.

Ordinarily when you read a headline like that, the article fails to measure up in terms of material for a humor columnist but this time the header was just an indication of the riches to come.

A chief political strategist said “The Senate is notoriously independent and unwilling to be stampeded.”  I don’t know if that political strategist has ever calculated the average body fat of the typical senator but most of these elected officials are physically incapable of being stampeded anywhere except to the Home Town Buffet on Fried-Fat Fridays.  The loneliest place in Washington D.C. has got to be the Congressional Gym and for good reason.  Last year Senator Harry Reid was honestly, I swear to God, quoted as saying, “I’ve been going to the gym for 24 years and I’ve never been lobbied in the gym.  Of course, I’m pretty ugly naked.”

Try dropping that little gem at your next soiree and I guarantee you will be the life of the party.

The stimulus plan article also quoted Senator Max Baucus as saying, “The Senate is not going to willy-nilly rubber stamp what the House does.”

How the reporter managed to soberly write down that quote without experiencing severe intestinal discomfort is a true miracle.  I have no idea what it would look like for the Senate to willy-nilly rubber stamp anything but one would have to assume it would require them to be stampeded while naked. 

Now none of this would have been reported without assistance from the White House.  That kind of goes without saying but the article said that White House spokeswoman Dana Perino should be given the credit for “sounding the alarm about Senate tinkering.”

Thank God we have public servants who have devoted their lives to the protection of the citizens at appropriate times.  We have a color-coded threat-level system, we are prevented from hijacking airplanes with nail clippers and we are rooted from our ignorance when our Senate tinkers.

I don’t know about you, but I will be sleeping better at night safe in the knowledge that the United States Senate will refrain from stampeding and willy-nilly rubber stamping, that if they are lobbied they will be fully clothed and should they even think about tinkering, the media will be alerted.

But then again, I’m sleeping better at night because I’m exhausted from shoveling.