Did you catch it?

You know, the other day. Did you catch it?

You know the day I’m talking about. It was just a couple of days ago. It was that day that, just for a while, maybe a couple hours, half an afternoon tops, that it almost felt just a tiny bit as if, perhaps, just maybe, possibly it might almost be spring.

Did you catch that?

Our dogs caught it. When I let out German shepherd, Shilo, and Caicos, our assistant dog, outside the other day, they both gave me a look that either said. “Is this spring?” or, “I’m hungry.”

With dogs, it’s sort of hard to tell.

But because I had just fed them an hour earlier, I opted to go with the “Is this spring?” look.

“I don’t know,” I said to Shilo and Caicos. “It could be, but it could also be a cruel hoax.”

By the way, you can tell when you’ve been working from home alone too long when you find yourself talking to your dogs about the weather.

The problem with trying to catch spring around here is that we seldom have an actual spring anymore. What we have is sprinter. First, we have winter, then we have sprinter, then we have spummer and then we have summer.

I don’t know what happened to spring, but somewhere along the line, it got hijacked.

When I was a kid many, many, many, many (I’m trying to indicate here that I’m old) years ago, spring used to last forever. And I once lived in Ames, Iowa.

That’s right. I remember a time when there was spring in Ames, Iowa.

But now we pretty much go from winter to summer with a token mild day or two thrown in between extremely cold and extremely hot days.

Here’s what usually happens:. Sometime around late March, we get a sort of mild but not too mild day, and we all rejoice the arrival of spring. Then the next day, we find ourselves looking for the coats that we foolishly stored away when we naively thought spring had arrived.

Then we get a couple weeks of not too cold but certainly not warm, cloudy, dreary weather. Sort of like spring in England without the soccer riots.

Then, just when we think spring will never get here, we jump right into summer and we find ourselves saying, “Wait, what happened?” to ourselves.

Well, that is if you work at home alone. If you work at work with other people, you probably say, “Wait, what happened?” to each other. Assuming you actually like the people you work with and aren’t instead saying, “Gee, I wish I worked at home alone,” to yourself.

Almost as bad as the vanishing springs are the vanishing spring weekend days. Sometimes we’ll get warm springlike weather from, let’s say, Monday through Thursday. And then on Friday, just when we’re looking forward to a nice springlike weekend, winter comes back.

And then, of course, Monday rolls around and spring returns.

Don’t you hate that?

This weekend, I was looking forward to spending time in our backyard, sipping beer and watching baseball while a couple slabs of baby back ribs slowly cook on our outdoor smoker.

Instead, it looks like I’ll spend time in our living room, sipping beer and watching baseball while some sort of winter food simmers on our stovetop.

See how weather impacts my life?

Our weather patterns have become so screwy that we have to change our weather adages and rhymes.

You know, like, “March comes in the lion and goes out like a … well not quite a lion but certainly not like a lamb. I want to say like a slightly irritated lemur.”

So enjoy your sprinter. And before you know it, October will roll around and it will be time for — you guessed it — fummer.