There are certain things that I abhor more than the thought of a visit to a farsighted proctologist with the hiccups. One is a root canal without anesthesia and another is doing taxes.

This last Thursday was a day like any other except that I had to make a special run to the ville to pick up some unique flowers.

Unfortunately last Thursday was also programmed by the weather gremlins to be a foul mixture of wind gusts weaving through the area herding around alternating cantankerous snow squalls and spiteful rain blasts.

Being a careful guy I took a look at the regional radar to see when I’d get a break. All I saw was a wall of deep green moving up the inlet and a forecast note “Things will continue to be the major pits until they aren’t.”

Editor’s note: This column was originally published in The Clarion on Dec. 25, 2011. Author Nick Varney said he had several requests to share it again this year.

We all have certain memories or thoughts of times and places that provide us with an internal source of warmth and comfort wherever we may be or what circumstances we face. Mine is of Christmases past and those held within the palm of the future.

By the time you read this we should have resurfaced from a southern sojourn to western Washington. The impetus for our travel was that a curmudgeon uncle said he was getting ready to declare me dead.

It seems my truculent Uncle Sid had decided that since I hadn’t visited in so long and was, according to his standards, decidedly remiss in calling or writing that he had no choice but to deduce that I was permanently horizontal and had assumed the temperature of the air surrounding a standard stiff.