350 Down. 16 To Go

The weather is about to turn cold. I know this because I’ve started to enjoy the heat again. It happened on the way to the park with LMJ. We were walking, and she was telling me things when I stopped and smelled the roses for just a moment. I had been frustrated all day that I couldn’t walk from my car to my office without sweating at 7:30 in the morning in the middle of December, but walking in my Old Jacksonville neighborhood on the way to the park, in shorts, with my beautiful little girl, I realized that only a complete jackass would complain. People in Chicago and Philadelphia would commit atrocities against their neighbors for an afternoon like the one I was experiencing. Afternoons like today’s are the whole reason I live in Florida. Yes, the “Happy Birthday Jesus” house seems a little bit out of place with the sun shining on an 80 degree day, but LMJ loves it and she loves telling me about all the little things she notices about it. We got to the park and we swung and went up and down the slide – the little slide, not the big one. There was an incident with the big slide a couple of weeks ago, so now she gets up to it like she’s going to ride it but climbs back down at the last minute. We ran in the grass, had a picnic, and threw rocks. The rock throwing ship has sailed. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I pick up rocks and throw them everywhere I see them, and now she does too. I just hope to keep the broken windows to a minimum as she grows up. I’ve done a complete one-eighty on the weather. I’ve gone from hating the heat to loving it again, but being the pessimistic bastard that I am, I’m expecting freezing rain for the rest of the year.