You happy? Winter heard us yammering on and on about the mild temperatures we’ve been having, the taunts of wearing shorts in January, the musing aloud that you haven’t had to pull the sweater’s out from the storage tote under the bed. We always know it’s going to happen eventually, but it’s nothing you ever get used to.

They say that Tibetan monks can sit in the snow wearing nothing but a thin robe and meditate their way to bodily warmth. A simple exercise of mind over matter. I’d hazard a guess that their minds, and thinly clad bodies, have never been seated over the matter of a sub-zero winter in the Dakotas?

I am always amazed at the way livestock and wild game stoically face whatever weather comes their way. Even our pampered black lab doesn’t seem to pay any mind to the elements. He waits patiently for his walk around the neighborhood, while I stuff myself into various layers of winter clothing. This gives him the opportunity to fill up a bit more on water so he doesn’t risk running out of identification before we make the full loop.

He’s about 13-years old, bum hips and pert near stone deaf, but he acts like a young pup when I start getting my walking shoes on. The mind is willing, but the physical reality catches up to him before we make the first turn at the end of the block. So it goes.

I often wonder why our ancestors came here, or at least why they stayed after the first winter? I understand the allure of the “free land” that was offered in the Homestead Act of 1862, but there was a tremendous amount of fine print on that brochure.

I suppose once you’ve gambled everything you own on the prospect of making a better life for you and your family, you can’t just call it quits because you lost a toe or two to frostbite. We have ten for a reason.

Speaking of evolution…Happy Darwin Day…keep evolving my friends. I bet if our ancestors knew what they were migrating towards 60,000 years ago (give or take), they would have stayed put in balmy old Africa. But us human folk are driven to move, driven to see what’s over the horizon, driven by the thrill of exploration, driven to slowly wander away from those that annoy us.

I’m not an evolutionary biologist, but I bet that annoying life force sucking vampires were often the catalyst that prompted others to move a little further up the river, over that next hill, across to another continent, and finally…the Dakotas.

It started with TukTuk 60,000 years ago (give or take). Several of his tribe mates just couldn’t stand the loud manner in which he chewed his toenails (TukTuk means “loud toenail chewer” in our ancient tongue), and they couldn’t bare another telling of his boring stories around the campfire.

Especially the one about him bringing down a sabretooth tiger with a spear from a distance of 100 paces. Everyone knows that TukTuk couldn’t hit the savannah if he fell out of a tree, and he falls out of lots of trees. You try sitting in a tree while you chew your toenails.

Everyone knows full well that Rocko is the one that brought down the sabretooth tiger, but he likes TukTuk’s sister, so he let him believe it was his spear that hit the mark. Rocko regretted this decision, as he soon found out she chewed her toenails too.

Thankfully this male propensity to do stupid things to try and gain the admiration of a female never caught on.