Spring has Sprung...

...My ass.

Oh, pardon my uncharacteristic vulgarity (I like to think that my characteristic vulgarity is on a much higher plane), but the truth is that I'm deeply and broadly annoyed.  I think I need a Wayward Nurse to drop in and administer a bromide (with some gin in it), although I wouldn't mind if Biff there with the loosened tie came along for the ride.

So, you ask - what's got my goat?  Oh, children - sit down and take a deep breath.  It's a long list.

First up, as an aside, yes, I'm home.  Flew in at the end of the weekend into yet another gale of snow and misery.  It was an especially unlovable journey, for on departing Vienna I encountered a hiccup of travel that I'd never encountered before:  high ground winds were preventing the onloading of any luggage in Vienna.  Apparently it was fine to hurtle an enormous metal tube full of people into the skies in these weather conditions, but not to trundle the carts carrying our bags out onto the runway beforehand.  Curious.  We travelers were all of course convinced that this was the most transparent of excuses and that there was some new, unreported wrinkle in the sad saga of the missing Malaysian plane, but it seems that the good people of British Airways were telling us the truth, for in due course (if "more than 48 hours later" counts as due course), the bag did indeed appear.

And now - hence Miss Wayward up there - I'm paying for my sins with a streaming cold.  Fortunately, I have a gap week before it's once again incumbent on me to wax evangelical about the glories of strategic communications to yet another bunch of fresh-faced young professionals, as I fear today I would be a tragic presence in any classroom not explicitly studying aspects of early morbidity from the clinical perspective.  I'm staying home, comforted by the presence of terriers and strong Egyptian cold medications of a kind that are but a distant memory in today's American meth-wary pharmacies.

And on top of that, they have nerve on the blasted news - damn you, NPR! - to remind us, repeatedly, that today is the Vernal Equinox, heralding the end of winter and the coming of spring.  If there weren't great dispirited heaps of blackened snow outside, and if it weren't rawly, bone-chillingly cold, I might feel a tad less cynical about the whole thing.  I'm no climate-change skeptic, but the past five months have indeed turned the concept of "global warming" into something that seems infinitely desirable, rather than a harbinger of cataclysm that inevitably awaits us all.

So I'm grumpy and sniffy and generally an unappealing, self-pitying mass of gloom.  Fortunately, the cure, at least in part, is at hand: when this mood strikes, there is nothing like a little trip to Tilling to restore one's spirits.  There, it's summer time, people are trading down their houses to make a killing off seasonal renters, and Quaint Irene has painted herself once more into a scandal.  Excuse me, then, for I'm spending the rest of the morning in the Garden Room at Mallards.  Maybe I'll take Biff with me.