Winter Approaches

I am approaching my third winter here in North Georgia. To be perfectly honest, I’m not real excited about it. While winter here is not remotely like winter in, say, Montana or Minnesota, there is a 3 to 4 month stretch when it gets wet and cold and your outside activities are limited.

When compared to the mostly perpetual Florida sunshine, winters here can be gloomy at times. There are periods when it is overcast, damp and chilly and you don’t see the sun for several days in a row. It’s awfully hard to be bright and perky when you feel like you’re living in the Middle Ages. (For some reason I picture the Middle Ages as being dark, dank and gloomy. Maybe it’s because they are also referred to as the Dark Ages.)

They say that the reason you get moody on overcast days has to do with lowered levels of vitamin D due to lack of sunshine. There’s even a name for the condition. It’s called Seasonal Affective Disorder or SAD. Isn’t it cute how the acronym for the disorder spells one of the symptoms? I don’t think I have SAD. I just prefer sunny days to gloomy days. Call me crazy.

Part of the reason I am not looking forward to winter is because I’m afraid I will get bored. The garden is done for the year, and that means I will have more time on my hands. I get bored rather easily, and I am not very good at just passing time or doing make-work. When I have time on my hands and nothing interesting to do is usually when I get myself in trouble. Boredom causes me to get cantankerous and disputatious (how’s that for a five dollar word?). When I’m bored I have a tendency to go around poking sharp sticks in people’s asses just to get a reaction and liven things up. As they say up here, idle hands do the devil’s work, and that is certainly true in my case.

It seems obvious that the solution is to find new and interesting activities to occupy my time over the winter months. All I’ve got to do is find some, and right now nothing comes to mind. Ah well, anything’s better than having to get up every day to go to work.

Switching gears, it has been two years and two months since I retired and moved here from crowded Pinellas County, Florida. When I told people that I was retiring and moving to a rural, sparsely populated county located in the North Georgia mountains some of them looked at me like I was nuts. On a whim I started this blog in order to document my experiences.

To date I have written 127 posts or pretty close to one post a week, and each post averages about 900 words. That comes to almost 115,000 words. That’s not as impressive as it sounds because I have used a lot of words more than once. It’s not like I know 115,000 different words. I tend to use words like “the”, “and”, and “a” a lot. I guess I’m not all that creative.

It’s also not like I’m writing complicated prose. Just for the hell of it I took what I have written so far in this post and ran it through one of the websites that give you readability scores. Here are the results:

                  Readability Formula                      Grade
                  Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level          6.8
                  Gunning-Fog Score                        9.6
                  Coleman-Liau Index                      7.3
                  SMOG Index                                  7.3
                  Automated Readability Index         5.2
                  Average Grade Level                      7.2

According to the website: “A grade level (based on the USA education system) is equivalent to the number of years of education a person has had. A score of around 10-12 is roughly the reading level on completion of high school. Text to be read by the general public should aim for a grade level of around 8.”

I was surprised by the results. My average grade level is 7.2. You would think that with four years of college, two years of graduate school, and three years of law school I could write at more than a seventh grade level. These scores make me think I could have communicated easily with Neanderthals. I thought I was being brilliant but it seems I’m the North Georgia version of Dumb and Dumber. Koko the gorilla could hand sign at a higher grade level than 7.2. Dr. Seuss’s books have higher readability scores. Hell, John Kerry can probably understand this post.

I’ll tell you one thing. If you have trouble reading this post, you’re in deep doodoo. You may be functionally illiterate. I hear the local high school has good GED program. On the positive side it’s good to know that you’re brighter than three of the five hosts on The View, anyone who has ever joined the Black Lives Matter group and Kanye West.

It was easier to write this blog when I first arrived because almost every experience was unique. Now things are getting familiar, and some of the novelty has worn off. I suppose I’ll run out of things to write about someday, and that will be it for this blog. That may be a good thing for modern culture and the advancement of civilization. Given the readability scores of this post I doubt I’m contributing much to the literary world or to the gene pool for that matter.