Wow! Today is my birthday and I just put the 72nd notch in my “walking cane of life.” Plus, ol’ Nevah shares a birthday with me, but she doesn’t have quite as many notches.

Normally, the last two weeks in January are the coldest weeks of winter. But this year (thanks to global warming and climate change, I’ll bet), the last two weeks have been unseasonably warm.

How warm wuz it? Well, two days ago it was 78 degrees, windy and sunny, and my friend Mocephus and me went to a pretty Flint Hills pond and caught us a nice mess of filleting-size crappie and a few bass to boot. Usually, if we’d gone fishing on that date, we’d have had to cut through six-inches of ice and built us a cozy fishing shack.

And, today, it wuz still comfortable outdoors if I bundled up a bit, so I chopped some willows from around my pond with my rotary cutter, and then switched to a disk and disked up all my wildlife food plots and gardens. Most winters I only fire the tractor up to push  snow.

But, even though I know winter is not over, I figger that every warm day in January puts me one day closer to the real warm weather of spring. Heck, it’s been so warm that the wild birds — at least the cardinals and Canada geese — have been going through their pre-mating rituals.

This weekend will put me back to reality. The forecast is for up to an inch of cold rain and possible snow and one night the temperature is supposed to dip to 10 degrees.

***

Okay, here’s a little story that will make the distaff half of my readers go “Gr-r-r-r-r.” I’m warning you, if you’re a sensitive woman, don’t keep reading.

A farm wife goes to the doctor, worried about her husband’s temper.
The doctor asks, “What’s the problem?”
The woman says, “Doctor, I don’t know what to do. Every day my husband seems to lose his temper over something that happens on our farm or something he sees on television. It scares me.”
The doctor says, “I have a cure for that. When it seems that your husband is getting angry, just take a glass of water and start swishing it in your mouth. Just swish and swish, but don’t swallow it until he either leaves the room or calms down.”

Two weeks later the farm wife comes back to the doctor, looking fresh and reborn.
The woman says, “Doctor that was a brilliant idea! Every time my husband started losing it, I swished with water. I swished and swished, and he calmed right down! How does a glass of water do that?”
The doctor says, “The water itself does nothing. It’s keeping your mouth shut that does the trick.”

Okay, ladies, I know you didn’t stop reading. I gave you plenty of warning.

***

Let’s get a little silly with a story.

The local watering hole, The Dew Drop Inn, is like many other businesses. It is home to a resident cat. The Dew Drop bar in our community has a very well-groomed resident cat who is quite friendly.

In fact, the owner has a rule that no customer may order a drink without having the kitty sit in his lap and groom herself for a while. He wants to be sure that all his customers can hold their licker.

I warned you, it wuz silly.

***

Sorting through my old emails, I discovered one that dates back to Halloween. It’s a good ‘un, even though it’s outdated, so I’m gonna use it just so I can get this column done quicker. I’ve got better things to do on my birthday.

Dee Dee from Little River, Kan., wrote: “Milo, enjoyed your stories about Halloween pranks. We had our fun back in the day, too. There were a few outdoor privies in Little River when I was a kid and I helped tip over a few of them. I also soaped a lot of cars and windows or wrote on the cars with that old white shoe polish.

“Funny, too, I made a lot of pocket money by asking the people later if they wanted me to clean up their autos. They probably would have shot me if they’d known I was the one that did it.

“When I was probably in the 6th grade, I watched the big boys do their thing. I thought it was neat that they let us little kids tag along. One time they took a girl’s little Crosley vehicle she’d left parked on main street and put it crossways in an entrance to a store. Another time I watched the older kids dismantle an old horse drawn wagon and put it on the roof of one of the businesses on Main Street all put back together.”

***

For my words of wisdom this week, how about these words from tough sheriff Joe Arpaio in Maricopa County, Ariz. He said,  “A liberal paradise would be a place where everybody has guaranteed employment, free comprehensive healthcare, free education, free food, free housing, free clothing, free utilities, and only law enforcement has guns. And believe it or not, such a place does, indeed, exist. It’s called prison.”

Enuf pontification for the week. Have a good ‘un.