​If you live in Wisconsin, it snows in April. You know this. It doesn’t matter if you’re way up north by Rhinelander or the far southeast in Kenosha. It snows most years in April.

Sometimes it’s a light dusting. Sometimes it’s an inch or two. Sometimes you get eight inches. The beauty is that the snow doesn’t stick around long. Because the ground has warmed up, these spring storms that dump the white stuff melt quickly and the next day accumulations often dissipate the full ground cover.

But that doesn’t keep people from complaining. This fascinates me.

It’s normal for us to get snow this time of year. Then it’s normal for the temperature to reach 55 degrees the next day. And for us to get an inch of rain the day after. So what? Why complain? It’s the way it is.
 
We’ve had three snow dumps this April. None too serious. The predictions are always worse than the bite. The weather forecasters do their best to scare us. We wonder if we’ll be able to get to work the next day. Should I pull out my winter jacket again, look for my gloves and stocking cap?
 
If you adopt the right attitude (that these weather swings are to be expected and will change again quickly), you’ll get along with your daily life having no emotional issues. If instead, you expect weather to fit your personal lifestyle, then you’ll whine away like there’s something wrong.
 
I sometimes wonder how much Facebook amplifies our current culture of complaint. After our most recent April snow accumulation it seemed like the snow complainers were out in force. “Snow in April sucks.” “I can’t believe it’s going to snow again.” “When will the snow end?”
 
Sure, it’s a slight inconvenience, particularly if the roads get buried, the plows and salt trucks have to come out. But that’s typically not the case.
 
Our most recent bout, for example, just this past week, was predicted to be 5-10 inches, depending on where you lived in the southeastern part of the state. We got maybe two inches at our house. It was nice. We had a fire in the fire place, staying cozy.
 
In the morning we went to our local park to walk our two dogs, per our normal routine. The dogs were pumped. The snow quieted the world. The views were stupendous as the trees and bushes were coated in light fluff.

The sun came up, dazzling the landscape and our eyes. “How much of the snow will be left by the day,” I quizzed my wife.

She predicted all the snow would be gone. I predicted that 95 percent of it would be gone, with slight traces left in places of shade not touched by sun during the course of the day.
 
She won. All gone. Our footprints on the trails at the park that morning erased in less than six hours.
 
That’s April in Wisconsin as it should be. Take the time to enjoy it for what it is – a chance to appreciate the sublime beauty of our landscape amplified by a coating of white armor.
 
Those dang hot days of summer are approaching. Then it’s time to start complaining.

The other day a car ad popped up on TV. “Save $8,079 through our special April offer.” OMG!
 
That dollar figure “savings” floored me. Smashed me in the face. Made me realize my age and how much has changed the past 40 years regarding car prices vs. the yearly income of most human beings in the United States. If you’re saving that much, WHAT IS THE ACTUAL PRICE of the vehicle? I don’t want to know.
 
Probably over 80 percent of Americans cannot afford a new car. It doesn’t mean people still don’t buy them. They just finance it longer or maybe they lease instead of buying.
 
If I go back in my memory banks, I remember when the last car went over the $1,000 purchase price for a new car: the Volkswagon Beetle (the old one, that’s right). They kept their price at $999, ballyhooing it about, then they too succumbed to break the thousand dollar barrier.

Now you can get over eight thousand dollars back on a deal. Let that settle into your brain.
 
That’s eight times in SAVINGS what you used to PAY for your car. Hmmmm, if we do some math, that would mean your annual income should be at least eight times what you made in 1979, probably closer to 20 or 30 times if you consider you’re saving that eight grand and it’s not the purchase price. So if you were raking in 15 grand a year in 1979, you need to make about $300,000 annually to now afford a comparable model of car.

That’s certainly not happened for me. Nor for the vast majority of our citizens. Is it any wonder we go in debt?
 
My first car (second-hand, of course), purchased with my older brother while we were in high school, was a black Chevy Biscayne, a true boat you could sail the streets of Kankakee, Ill., with. It cost $250. We could afford that, and paid cash from the jobs we worked at the time.
 
It broke down regularly, we put new (used) tires on it when necessary, and we didn’t take any long trips with it. But the “Black Beauty,” as we termed it, served its purpose to get us and our friends to our after-school and weekend jobs, the golf course and school. 
 
We broke the bank on our next vehicle, spending $895 on one that had to have its gas tank pumped regularly to keep the fuel line from clogging. There’s your first price inflation lesson as a teenager -- $250 to $895 in just a few years.
 
I bought my first new car when I was in my early 30’s and it cost just under 10 grand. That was around 1990. The price was almost the $8,079 you can now SAVE on your current purchase of a new vehicle.
 
Cars today cost what most Americans could probably afford to pay for four or five years worth of housing. The average price of a new vehicle as of 2019, just topped $34,000.
 
If you put 10 grand down and financed $24,000 at zero percent, you could pay that off at $200 a month for the next 10 years. Sounds about right. But it shouldn’t be.

​Someone forwarded a joke to me last week. It was pretty funny, and I laughed. What did I do afterwards?
 
Did I get on the phone, call up three buddies and tell them the joke verbally, practicing the punch line, getting better and better until I dominated it? Or did I copy and paste it to some friends, sharing it with others through email?
 
Though I did neither of these, what most people do these days is the latter – sending it along online. Joke telling is a lost art. We don’t get with people face-to-face as much anymore, engage in conversation, and say, “Oh man, have you heard the one about?”
 
That saddens me because humor is a connector. Laughing together is a good thing. It’s why bowling is fun. You’re with people, everyone has a different style, we all do goofy things when we throw a gutter ball, and that causes laughter. Plus, there is beer. Let’s not forget that.
 
Years ago, my editor taught me the art of joke telling. I had no idea how to become an expert. Every once in awhile our dad would tell me a joke, and I’d try to retell it a few days later and fall flat.
 
My editor demonstrated to me the guidelines of success. He would get on the phone after a buddy shared information for a story, then that person would tell him a joke. He would get off the line, call three other sources, tell them the joke, then ask what was going on, and ask for documents, reports or quotes for a story he was working on. It worked marvelously.

He got people laughing. They opened up to him. They sent him information for the stories.  And he got really good at the jokes.

It took me multiple years of hearing this before it registered on me that like any other skill set, you had to practice it. If you want to make people laugh and have just the right pitch on the punch line, you better work on it to get it right.
 
I started down the path, stealing from him, going to my sources and telling jokes face to face, changing the pitch, working on the delivery, gauging reactions. It was fun. Others shared jokes back. It became a connection, and to this day I have multiple close friends because of that.
 
Online joke sharing eliminates that. Instead, in an impersonal manner, we share the written word. Nothing wrong with that per se, but body language, tone and inflection are lost, so it’s not the same.
 
I think that’s something we’ve lost in general since the turn of the century, when email truly became ubiquitous. It’s accelerated since then with texting, instant messaging and Snap Chat. Because it’s easier, we forward the joke along rather than memorizing, thinking about it, practicing it, then actually calling or seeing a few people and relating it to them.
 
Face-to-face joke telling is spectacular. When you’re around masters, it’s hard to find a situation that’s funnier than jokesters trying to one-up each other.
 
Put it on your weekly to-do list. Take that next forwarded joke and don’t forward it. Call your three best friends and tell it to them over the phone. Maybe you’ll crash. Or maybe you’ll start your stand-up career.

​Don’t wear white clothes. It’s a disaster waiting to happen. I speak from experience.

My wife knows it’s a no-no for me to wear white anything. It would be a guarantee, probably within minutes, of me staining the shirt, pants or sweater. Bets would be placed to guess how quickly I could spill something on the pristine piece of clothing.

I learned long ago not to buy white golf shirts or pants. On TV, you see golfers with Mr. Clean bright white pants. They dazzle the eyes. But when I look at them, all I see are stains waiting to happen.

How the heck can they keep those white pants so clean? I’d really like to know. With all the traveling and wiping their hands after they clean mud or grass off their ball or club, I can’t figure out why there aren’t smears of life covering multiple parts of the pants.
 
And then there’s the white shirts. How the heck do the armpit stains not show?  When they sweat and it’s windy out and dust is blowing around, how does that white shirt continue to sparkle shot after shot?
 
I don’t get it. There’s a klutziness factor in our family, handed down by my dad. I inherited the gene big time, as did my two brothers. We regularly mock each other by handing out “El Klutzo” awards for the biggest klutziness maneuver.
 
Mine, recently (and I haven’t told the bros this one yet), occurred last week. I wore one of those short-sleeved golf windbreakers to work. While not 100 percent white, it was just slightly off-white. And pristine when I drove to work.

Something happened that day. I don’t know what. But when I went out for lunch, there were gray smears in four or five spots in the area of my gut. How did they get there? How the heck should I know? But it will allow me to take over the El Klutzo award lead. I’ll jump to the head of the standings.
 
That’s the thing about white clothes (or other solid light color clothing as well). It has a magical, dare I say even mystical, ability to attract the dirt of the world and become a mess in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee. And really, don’t even think about having a cup of coffee or considering cooking or eating spaghetti. You’re courting disaster.
 
Our dad accepted a challenge from us at a family dinner a number of years before he passed away. We were giving him a hard time about how he stained his shirt when he ate, and we told him he couldn’t make it through dinner without splashing something on it. He pulled up so closely to the dinner table that his gut and chest were pinned to the table, and he placed a thick napkin over it, so no food could get through.

He ate carefully. He didn’t slop it down the way he usually did. He pushed away from the table with pride afterwards. And sure enough, there were stains down the front.

​That’s me with white shirts or pants. There is no hope. White clothes look sharp on pro golfers. But for me, they’re just props so I can win the El Klutzo award.