Now that winter is rearing its icy head, I am not one of those people who wax nostalgic about fireplaces and heating their homes with open fireplaces or wood/coal burning stoves or furnaces.

If I was a TV weather forecaster employed by, name a Kentucky station, and if I had accurately predicted several big snows in December and January as well as a couple of floods, along with two more big snows in February, I would make arrangements to be out of town during the entire month of March.

In fact, no matter what my batting average might turn out to be, from December through February, I would have started a campaign in January to have my viewers accompany me on a cruise from somewhere in Florida to the source of the Nile. Or maybe we’d go to Australia and New Zealand since your host has always wanted to frolic with aborigines and rub noses with a Maori maiden.

If I could talk enough of my devoted viewers into signing up and shelling out we could all have the time of our lives and it wouldn’t cost me a penny because, hey, I’m the guy who thought it up and I haven’t steered you wrong all winter. You owe me, big time.

Let’s face it folks. Being a Kentucky meteorologist in March is very dangerous to your professional reputation. The best way to protect yourself is to get as far from the state as possible until April Fool’s Day has come and gone.

If you can’t afford to take off work and if the cruise fell through, you might be able be able to join the Weather Guy Exchange Program, whereby you swap places for a month with a counterpart at a sister station in, let’s say, San Diego.

While you’re out there doing your report on pending mudslides from the big zoo, with a giraffe or ostrich staring down at you as you speak, your exchange buddy will be back in Kentucky trying to explain why the six inch snow he had predicted last night failed to materialize. Or maybe he’ll be trying to explain why he forgot to mention, last night, the foot of white stuff we got that is out there snarling traffic at daylight.

But, to give credit where it’s due, every once in a while our meteorologists do get March weather right. It happened last Sunday afternoon and night when I couldn’t keep up with the basketball scores because winter weather warnings kept streaming across the bottom of the screen. The evening news forecaster claimed that it would actually happen this time.

Then we woke up at 5 a.m. on Monday morning because the dog was barking, looking out the upstairs window, scared of the snow. Said dog weighs just over 100 pounds, but, if it looks scary, he barks because he thinks he’s supposed to sound the alarm.

In the meantime, Loretta switched to one of the TV weather apps on her cell phone and, sure nuff, the same guy we’d seen 11 hours earlier was out there stranded off the pavement on I-75 south. He couldn’t get any farther and he couldn’t turn around to get back, but he was more gleeful than a kid on Christmas morning. I actually thought he might have hit the Powerball jackpot and had just now found his ticket. That’s how elated people in his profession get when they nail a March weather forecast in Kentucky.

However, as I said earlier, if I was a Kentucky weather guy, I’d have been on an extended south seas cruise or swapping places with my buddy in San Diego while all of this was going on.

When I returned home in April I’d be welcomed with a ticker tape parade down Richmond Road from the Athens exit all the way to Rupp Arena. That’s how tickled my viewers would be to have their trustworthy weather guy back in town.

My first forecast would advise viewers not to plan any serious gardening for the next couple of weeks because the ground wasn’t going to be dry enough to plow. It’s nearly impossible to be wrong about the first two weeks of April.

Reach longtime Enterprise columnist Ike Adams at ikeadams@aol.com or on Facebook or 249 Charlie Brown Road, Paint Lick, KY 40461.