Guilty Pleasures

It was a surprising day in Streeterville today. The weather guys, both in the newspaper and on TV said we were to get a bunch of lake effect snow and it was going to be mild. I prepared mentally for the snow and mild temps and lo and behold, I awoke this morning to clear blue skies and a beautiful view from the 14th floor. When I got into the Mini and drove to work, lo and behold it was 9 degrees at the lakefront and 6 degrees at the outpost in Back of the Yards. Apparently the running tally is, as of this moment, Groundhog-1, TV Weather Guy-0.

TV weather guys, newspaper weather guys, any kind of weather guys are just one of my guilty pleasures in life. Talk about the weather? I can do that ad nauseum, and Babs ribs me about it ad nauseum. RDR, Weather Geek. It's true.

Guilty pleasures? We all have them. Some people have perverse ones. Some people have oddball ones from left field. Some people just have a lot of them. Babs has chocolate and popcorn. I have a weather habit, and ..... and a couple of others.

Let me just say at this point, "Hey what's wrong with a little Wheel of Fortune every now and then. I've been watching the Wheel since the 80's when you had to spend the money you won on prizes, and if you had to little to buy something nice, you could spend it on a ceramic pig they always had. Can it be possible? Vanna looks better now than she did then. OK, cosmetic surgery may have helped a little, but anyway I get a guilty pleasure out of watching Wheel and solving the puzzles before the nimrods on the show do.

In the daytime I never watch TV, but sometimes in the afternoons there is Jeopardy. Answering those questions is a little more difficult than solving the Wheel puzzles, but I'm enough of a geek to be able to answer a goodly number of those as well. Another guilty pleasure. It's on at 3 PM Central Standard Time on ABC for anyone who's interested. I actually contacted the Jeopardy people to try out for the show once, but didn't make to the Chicago tryouts and was told to drop by whenever I'm in L.A. and I could test. Haven't been to L.A. in a long time. Jeopardy probably won't happen.

A lot of things can suffice as guilty pleasures in one's life. I totally suck at guitar, but I've been known to spend a lot of time at the Old Town School of Folk Music strumming, picking, and singing my little heart out. I like it. When I go on vacation, I really like going places where I can go on wine tours. Taste some wines, experience a nice climate, stay at a resort. Ahhh. So far I've done wine country in Napa, Australia, and New Zealand. At one time I thought of planning the next 10 years of my vacations by wine countries. Chile, South Africa, Argentina, France, Italy..... Hmmmm. Maybe I could parlay this interest into beer vacations too. England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands. Oh, I tried beer in France once. Forget it. French wine and cheese good. French beer bad. Did I mention? Beer, chips, pizza, wine. Guilty pleasures one and all.

OK so I seem to have a lot of guilty pleasures. The question is, "What purpose do these guilty pleasures serve?" Answer: "They make life tolerable. They make life worth living. That's what." Without one's guilty pleasures, one might as well become a monk, a hermit, a Puritan. The life of denial has never been one for me, and yet I'm still alive and healthy. I have learned to moderate my guilty pleasures over the years, and oh yeah, one of my guilty pleasures has become running long distances. Go figure.

Got to go for now. I have to get the guitar out and see if I can actually play a song I have conceptualized.