It was a beautiful spring day – temperatures in the 70s, sunny and still too early for bugs. Of course, I was stuck in an office building all day, but once I got out to my car I wantonly rolled down the windows in wild abandon. I kept my hand near the window button, however, because it is March in Minnesota and it could start snowing in five minutes. Not today, though.

That’s not to say that there weren’t white-out conditions, however. I drove home via the University and those crazy kids there couldn’t wait to bare arms, legs and pasty torsos to the thin sunshine. The co-eds had that kind of vulnerable, bedraggled look of a Monarch butterfly just out of the cocoon. A sign of spring, all the same, and I can’t blame them — around here if you get a nice day this early you’ve got to jump on it.

I had in mind to blog about something much darker today, but I’m going to let that notion pass for now. It’s been too nice a day and I don’t really feel like going to that place right now. We’re sure to have rain sometime this week, and maybe I’ll do it then. Driving home today about the only metaphorical cloud in the sky was the fact that I couldn’t seem to find a radio station that wasn’t in the middle of a bank of commercials.

Normally during my evening drive time I bounce between KFAN, The Patriot and KTLK. I’ll listen until they come to a commercial and then my itchy finger moves on down the line. Today, for some reason — perhaps a meteorological one that delivered us an unseasonably warm day but also mysteriously synchronized radio signals — every station was paying bills, and two of them were playing the same commercial. It was like being chased through Dinkytown by Tom Shane. Now I’ve been told that I have a face for radio, but if there’s anyone who does not have a voice for radio it’s Tom Shane. I know it’s hard to hear that, Tom, but you’re my friend (albeit in the diamond business) and I’ve got to level with you. Your voice is scary, and the only way you’d sell me any jewelry is if you cornered me in a dark alley, which by the way, I wouldn’t be surprised to find you in.

Ok, switch to plan D — rather, plan CD — to get some tunes going lest I be seduced into getting my basement waterproofed. I couldn’t remember what the last thing was I had playing in the CD player, but I figured I’d give it a shot. Uh-oh, Tom Waits. What had been perfect musical accompaniment on a cold, rainy night last week seemed jarringly out of place on a soft spring evening. Of course, Tom Waits can be jarring anytime. There was an amusing incongruity, however, in hearing him croak about something being as cold as a gut-shot wolf-bitch with nine sucking pups pulling a number 8 trap up a mountain in a snowstorm with a mouthful of porcupine quills. Now that’s cold. And that’s probably the forecast for next week.

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