Before I get started, let me give you a heads up that may help you understand some of the challenges we face in the newspaper game, or the online game, or whatever it is that passes for what I am engaged in at the moment.
If you are reading this column in the paper, all well and good. You just pick up the paper on Sunday morning, turn to this page, and there I am – as I have been every Sunday since Sept. 23, 1973.
Actually, I wrote a column for several years before that, but it wasn’t called “The Editor’s Notebook.”
It was called a number of things, such as “The Grapevine” or “Our Peripatetic Reporter” and things like that.
We started calling it “The Editor’s Notebook” because Jim Lonergan told me to, and I always did what he said.
This was his reasoning: Irv Lebowitz, the editor of The Lorain Journal, wrote a column by that name. It was well received. Jim was the boss over both The News-Herald and the Journal (now known as the Morning Journal), so when he told us what to call our columns, we did so without fussing about it because Jim usually knew what he was talking about. But I digress.
That was a long time ago. Things are different now. Times have changed. Columns like this are now written on computers. When they are printed out, they come inside the paper on Sunday.
But some people cannot wait until Sunday. Oh no! Perish the thought. They have to read it right away. So when I turn it in, it has a headline written on it and it gets “posted.” It gets posted on a “blog.” And, believe it or not, some people, perhaps dozens, are waiting anxiously to call up the blog so they can read it on their computers.
Me? I’m in no hurry. I can wait until Sunday, mostly because I already know what it says. But the people who don’t get to read it in advance (the lady of the house is an exception; she copy reads it for me so I can call in corrections later in the week) they don’t want to wait until Sunday. They want to read it right now, on the blog.
However, the column didn’t get written as early as usual this week because of global warming.
Global warming dumped so much snow in my driveway last Sunday while the Super Bowl was being played that my car was stuck there overnight.
We moved into the house almost nine years ago. It was the first time the car has sat in the driveway all night ever. I fervently hope it never happens again.
My brother watched the game at our house. A lot happened during those three-plus hours. All hell broke loose with the weather. It got horrendous outside. That’s much better than inside. Global warming brought in tons of snow, which was probably welcomed in Stowe, Vt. But not on our street.
And by the way, the big shots with the tiny minds in Washington have now figured out there was no such thing as global warming, so they are not calling it that any more. They are now calling it “climate change.”
Isn’t that cute? You can call it what you want, but there were a couple feet of climate change in the driveway when I got back from taking my brother home, who lives at least a mile away.
Johnnycake Ridge was perilous because city crews, which do a fabulous job, just couldn’t keep up with it.
We live on a short cul-de-sac with only four or five homes on it. It was jammed with snow.
I made it to my driveway and turned in. That was when the real excitement began. I was hopelessly stuck. I was enticingly close to the garage – maybe a hundred feet or so. So near and yet so far.
So instead of getting the car inside, where all the snow would have melted off, it was stuck in the driveway all night.
It got buried under even more snow – a lot more snow. There was no school the next morning because the whole world was buried under snow.
So the next morning I took a longer shower than usual as I contemplated my plight. I left a message with Tom Roseum, my snowplowing guy, and told him what was happening. He couldn’t plow the drive, I told him,  because the car was stuck in the middle of it.
So here’s what I did: I waited until the city plowed my street. As soon as it was cleared, I called Tom. “How long before you can get here?” I asked. Twenty minutes, he replied.
In five minutes I went out to dig out the car. I got it out into the street about a minute before Tom got there. There was zero traffic. I sat in the car while Tom did his thing. I even left the garage door open so he could get the blade inside and drag the snow away from the front.
Within just a few minutes he had all the snow moved to the side and I drove into the garage as easily and an uneventfully as if it were the Fourth of July.
But of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even Groundhog Day yet.  But it was a Super Bowl Monday I will always remember because of the global warming incident.
Excuse me. I mean, because of the climate change.