Sunday was Groundhog Day. That meant a few dozen crazy people dressed in silly clothes and hats rounded up the fat indolent rodents, placed them in their chubby hands and proclaimed we were either going to have six more weeks of winter or not.
There were groundhog prognostications in Pennsylvania, where this whole stupid game began a few decades ago and in Ontario, who borrowed the silliness in some place called Wireton where a Willy was hauled out to cast a shadow. This mindless game spread to the Maritimes where a hog named Sam was used in a nondescript town whose name started with an S and whose citizens were begging for attention and then there was another groundhog with another name to rhyme with a town somewhere in North America and before you know it, we have what we call overkill.
Well, here in Saskatchewan, I hope we don't fall for the old and worn out shadowy groundhog activities.
Let's determine spring's arrival with something a little more realistic but still just as stupid.
I say we dump the groundhog. Who has seen a groundhog in Saskatchewan, anyway? Who has seen a groundhog in February?
I thought so.
A deer in the headlights? Now we have something. Let's predict the arrival of spring by the number of seconds the deer stares without moving, each second would represent one day away from spring. Well, it's no dumber than looking for a rodent's shadow.
We have lots of those bushy tailed red squirrels romping around. I would be happy to lend civic officials my very own squirrelly Estevan Ernie or Estevan Edith who love to consume the sunflowers and peanuts in our residential casserole dish that serves as their feeder, with the food supplied by neighbour Linda and messy clean-up by ownself who generally just covers the trail mix leftovers with snow until spring.
Why can't Edith and Ernie be put to good use? Spring Squirrel Day in Estevan. If Ernie eats three peanuts and then hides two in a snowdrift, it means 38 days to springtime. If he eats two and buries three, it's 43 days. If he consumes five and buries none it's pretty well spring. If he eats four and buries four, then we have 47 days to wait. If he eats six and buries three but gets chased out of the casserole dish by a flock of invading pigeons, then we have the well-documented pigeon factor for our calculations to determine the exact arrival of springtime in the Energy City. Don't worry, we'll develop a mathematical formula that will be infallible or semi-fallible or at least as accurate as anything Phil, Sam and Willy can come up with. This year the forecasting groundhogs came up with conflicting arrival dates, sort of like Air Canada, whose motto is "We get there when we get there, so quit bothering us."
I am hoping that you'll jump all over these suggestions, dear diary. We need something to overcome the tedious winter, and groundhogs predicting spring's arrival just doesn't do it for us.
We all know Environment Canada is helpless, so why not use something a little more accurate like two nervous squirrels and a deer?
