I love summer, I like fall and I love spring. Can we just skip winter?

Pickles is one of my every-morning cartoon favorites, but even though I love autumn too, I also feel like singing that old blues tune, "I hate to see that evening sun go down." I do truly love summer and the older I get, the worse I hate to see the leaves turn and the temperatures drop. I'm cold-natured and getting worse with age.

We haven't covered our pool yet for winter, but we will soon and I hate to see that happen. When I'm working from home, as I was yesterday, I can take my breaks and my lunch on the pool deck along with my bestest canine buddy, Harry the pool dog, ever vigilant for any critter that might invade his territory.

Yesterday, I had a can of sardines for lunch and an Atkins-friendly low-carb beer, topped off with a cigar. Now that's a great lunch. And to prove once again that he will eat anything, Harry licked the mustard sauce left in the sardine can until it looked like it was factory new, ready to be refilled.

Soon the sun won't feel so good and the pool will be covered and the pool deck won't be such a pleasant place. And as the famous economist John Maynard Keynes said about the economic future, "In the long term, we're all dead." So enjoy fall while you can, endure winter and look forward to another spring, maybe.

Of course, there are worse things than growing old. There's growing old alone. I have a wonderful wife to share my life with (third time's the charm) and two children, a step-daughter and five grandchildren.

My sweet wife's brother Teddy gave us the above carved stone and my sweet wife put it out in the garden area next to the pool where she labors to diligently. I'm not taking it as a bad omen that it got cracked.

That's her rusty watering pot and the two shiny stones are some of the ones our 2.5-year-old granddaughter in Pittsburgh hand-painted and presented to us this past summer. Life is good and God is great. I'll continue to enjoy life as long as I'm here, and after that, I'm really enjoy the land where we'll never grow old.