By Mark Mosgrove

    I hate wintertime in Medina County! You wake up and it’s still dark out. It’s too cold to get out of bed, and you have to get bundled up just to go out and get the morning newspaper. As the biting wind smacks into your face, you think to yourself, why in the heck do I continue to put up with living here?
    The toilet seat is cold. The shower first spurts out freezing-cold water, and just when you get warmed up you have to get out and shiver while you dry off.
    You let your dog out to do his business and he tries to stand on one leg at a time because he’s freezing his paws off. Poor thing!
    You’re running late for work as it is, and you discover that the car windows are totally iced over. Boy, I’m really starting my day out on the right foot . . .
    You can’t feel your fingers on the steering wheel (where’s the darned heat in this car!) and you just start to warm up when you pull into work.
    Your coworkers are complaining about Sunday’s Browns game. “Lousy team,” they complain. “We went to the game and the wind was blowing off the lake . . . why did we spend thousands of dollars on tickets just to sit there and be miserable?”
    You have several meetings throughout the day, and everybody is late on account of the weather. It’s generally a miserable time being at work in the winter, because it’s dark when you leave for work and dark when you leave for home. And the dumb boss doesn’t like heating the workplace because he wants to keep the gas bill in check.
    Back at home, there are all kinds of chores that you have to do outside -- shovel snow, dig out your car, shovel snow, fix the mailbox the snow plow trashed, shovel snow, go to the emergency room after falling on the ice, shovel snow, etc. Let’s face it, no one wants to go outside for months.
    Your kids play the same video games by the hour and you are sick of hearing the same sound effects over and over again. And when the television is on, you can’t find anything interesting to watch. Same old crap. And you’ve already seen all the movies at the video store.
    With the arrival of Christmas comes the season of greed, as kids want, want, want, and parents spend, spend, spend. Somewhere buried in the commercial madness of the holidays lies a faint memory of what Christmas is really all about.
    And we all get fat and lazy over the winter. We might as well make like a bear and hibernate until spring, because winter is really not worth dealing with. I think I’ll just boycott winter this year, because the whole concept basically stinks!