“Where have all the flowers gone?”
– Pete SeegerYour mileage may vary, they say. Especially when you’re a cyclist and it’s “springtime” in the Colorado Rockies.

As most of the rest of the nation traded its hoodies for Hawaiian shirts and toddled off to get struttin’ drunk in the spring-break sunshine, Coloradans found themselves up to their American-flag lapel pins in real snow for the first time since “Wag the Dog” lit up the silver screen with its utterly fantastic, completely over-the-top tale of a president whose spin doctor whips up a war abroad as a distraction from woes at home.

For those of us who dream of replacing short, slushy slogs with sweet, sultry spins, it’s depressing, like finally getting that date with the stunning swimwear model only to have her show up in a snowmobile suit, on a pair of Sherpa Mountain Legends, instead of in a sultry black sheath and spike heels.

Winter was supposed to be over on March 19, f’chrissakes. We should be out and about, getting a start on our dork tans with knickers and rolled-down arm warmers. Instead, we’re stuck inside in the gray daytime with the lights on and the thermostat cranked up, reading press releases about VeloNews’s owners buying a ski-racing magazine. Do they know something we don’t? Boards up, bikes down? Entropy triumphant?

It is an infernal equinox, to be sure. Punxsutawney Phil must have toddled out of his burrow to see an unholy trinity of shadows – cast by the Abominable Snowman, Mr. Freeze and Boreas, God of the North Wind - then scuttled back inside and shot himself.Still, this latest and greatest arctic blast to put the Front Strange on ice wouldn’t be nearly as disheartening if we hadn’t been on such a meteorological roller coaster as winter entered the homestretch, with stretches of cold and snow alternating with spells of sunshine and warmth.

One week, a bolt of solar energy would galvanize us into shaving the legs and logging the miles, numbed brains thawing gradually in a warm endorphin bath, muscles blooming slowly beneath pallid skin. The next, a wintry blast would blow us right off our bikes and back into the gym, onto the rollers or into our running shoes.

It’s a familiar cycle for Coloradans. Or it was a familiar cycle, after six long years of drought. And then, out of nowhere, pow! We rolled out of bed on Tuesday to find that we’d been magically teleported from Tatooine to the ice planet Hoth, with the Empire cranking up a war and Luke Skywalker nowhere in sight.

We didn’t get what you’d call any serious accumulation here in Colorado Springs – maybe five inches, just enough to croak the road riding for sluggards like me, who thinks the only fender that was ever worth a damn was the one Hendrix played.

Back in our old hometown of Westcliffe, they got five feet, a bigger dumping than the Thanksgiving ’97 storm, when backhoe drivers were getting $75 an hour and up to liberate snowbound trophy-homers from their swanky hilltop prisons.

Now that’s a snowfall you can do something with. Snowshoe. Cross-country ski. Hunt for the woodpile with a snow shovel and a long pole. All you can do with a few paltry inches is shovel it. And while I’m a past master at shoveling it, what I enjoy shoveling will never be mistaken for snow.

It could be worse, I suppose. Without the moisture in this snow and rain, come the summer fire season I would be bitching about contesting city-limit sprints on a smoking bike with gooey, melting tires, raising one hand in triumph and beating out the flames on my charring jersey with the other.

And it’s not nearly as chilling as the snowjob we’ve been getting from the White House, a blizzard of half-truths, unsubstantiated charges and outright lies in defense of an illegal war to dethrone one tinpot dictator among many, a Frankenstein’s monster we helped create, in violation of every principle this country is supposed to stand for.

That stuff just keeps piling up, no matter how desperately you shovel. And there’s no promise of spring in it - just the menace of a bitter, endless winter.

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After reading the above, you might guess that the pointless screechings of the hopelessly deranged author bear no resemblance to the lofty principles espoused by VeloNews, VeloNews.com, Inside Communications Inc., our sister publications, Inside Triathlon and Ski Racing, our investors, our employees, our suppliers, subscribers, parents, children, our second cousin in Cleveland, the Department of Homeland Security, or Donald Rumsfeld. Wait a minute… actually, many of our employees are just as warped as the author and usually do agree with him. We’d get rid of them, but like O’Grady, they work cheap.Anyway, if you wanna go ahead and tell us (and your fellow readers)what you think this of this article, its author or the topic, why not drop us a line at Webletters@7Dogs.com? We'll post some of the better ones. We promise.