Temps aside, spring is here

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, April 20, 2007

Folks have been happy-happy most of this week with the return of weather that is more nearly what we expect of the spring season.

I took advantage of the decent weather to go for a run up at Maplewood on Saturday, my first of the season. It was great.

OK, it wasn’t great. The trails were sloppy-wet and even the gravel roads in the park’s back reaches were pretty mushy.

But it was sunny, the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, the birds were singing. So if not great, it was at least very good.

What’s interesting is the way our expectations are tempered by recent experience. Last year, the same temperatures we’ve had this week would have had us complaining about a cooling trend.

Daily highs in the middle of April ranged from 61 to 77, and the evening lows were consistently above freezing after the ninth.

This year, by comparison, the evening lows didn’t get above freezing until the middle of this week and we had our first 60-degree readings on Monday and Tuesday.

So Saturday, while I was splashing through the Maplewood mud and thinking about how warm it was, it was still 20 degrees cooler than the same date a year ago.

And the fact that it was only 60-something on Wednesday afternoon didn’t stop me from flipping on the air conditioning in my car.

I am worried, though, about the start of softball season.

It takes me about 18 weeks of practice to become anything but an embarrassment on the field, and it does not look like we are going to get those 18 weeks of prep time.

Last year we had been practicing for a couple of weeks, at least, by this time of year.

One thing that we can count on, however, is the beautiful and uplifting return of extra daylight.

This week, we have nearly 15 hours of daylight from morning twilight to evening twilight, and the sunsets each day have been lovely.

• • •

About 24 years ago, I was working for a group of weekly newspapers in southern Wisconsin. Calling on a distant advertiser one day, I left behind the scientific calculator that I was forced to buy for high school physics and had been using ever since.

For weeks, and then months, I meant to go back and retrieve but somehow never got around to it.

Eventually, many years later, I got around to buying myself another calculator, and found that the technology had improved significantly.

The new one lacked many scientific features, but I had found that newspaper work seldom requires the use of logarithms anyway, so that was no problem.

What I did get, for something like $10, was a tool no more than a quarter-inch thick, solar powered (actually, any light source will do) and which has proven sturdy enough to remain in use for decades. It is an amazing piece of technology.

All this came to mind one day recently when I fished the calculator out of its drawer and found that the hinge on its flippy screen (a feature, by the way, that is even more useless than logarithms) had broken.

The calculator still works, but it is at last starting to show signs of its age and I noticed, for the first time, that it is scratched and dented and that its grey finish is wearing off in some places. It is, in fact, probably a sign of its age it actually contains some metal parts.

I wish that I could find the engineer, now probably retired, who had drafted the specifications for that calculator. I would like to shake his — or her — hand and deliver a consumer report.

So much of what we use today is designed to be thrown away quickly, and this calculator was probably one exception. But it’s a pleasure when something exceeds expectations.

Dave Churchill’s column runs on Fridays.