Spring Training

Baseball season is almost upon us - which means that all good Red Sox fans will soon go into their annual vigil that will be disturbed not once by such trivia as eating, sleeping or proper hygiene. It also means that it's Spring, when the trees bud, the birds sing and the clocks spring forward. Daylight Savings time used to begin in mid-April, but global warming has caused it to gradually appear much earlier in the year - like the second weekend in March.

Spring weather in Boston is famously unpredictable. It can be hot and unbearable one day, say, 90 degrees in the shade, and then the breeze comes in off the Bay and the next day is only 55. There can be fog, rain, snow, sleet, thunder, lighting, hail and even volcanic eruptions - all in the same week (actually, the nearest volcano is in Iceland, and the prevailing winds carry the ash plume over Europe instead of New England). But there is one blessing - the layer of snow that covers the MIT campus from December to March finally melts away, revealing such wonders as sculptures that the students buried under snow in January. One of my dorm-mates also took note of the freeze-dried dogshit that appeared in the grass when the snows had melted.

Snowmelt meant it was possible to play softball. We could get in a good practice on the oval in front of the Green Building, where a few of our mighty sluggers would try to bounce a fly ball off the Sail. But because the weather was tricky, we never knew when practice could be held...