According to my calendar, Christmas is 85 days away. Yet last night I heard Brenda Lee‘s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” on a local radio station. I am sure it was some cheesy disc jockey’s ploy to be the first to play a holiday tune. The upbeat Lee song left me feeling blue. These aren’t the holiday blues. These are the “summer was lousy and followed a horrible winter and I don’t want winter back again” blues. Our bad weather started in early September of 2008, when rain poured down on Chicago, amassing a record number of inches and flooding basements (mine included). The rain was followed all too quickly by a cold snap and snow. That snow was joined by more snow and more snow as the winter progressed. We had a brief warm spell around Christmas which resulted in frozen roads everywhere. This wasn’t just slick pavement. This was literally a sheet of ice over every street (whether a one-lane country road or a major highway). I was stuck at my sister’s house for two days, waiting for the icy streets to become drivable. All winter I kept saying that as bad as it was, we really needed a good summer to balance things. That never happened. We had the least sunny summer since 1992. Now here it is, the end of September, and it was 40 yesterday. This doesn’t bode well for the winter. I guess all I can do is put on a sweatshirt and deal with it. Well, that and find that DJ and give him a big lump of coal upside his head. — John Wroblewski, distribution specialist