The spirit of a too-late Friday night is still coursing through my veins early on the first Saturday of November as I drive east into the Virginia countryside for my very first foxhunt. I’m late, and it doesn’t help that directions to the hunt’s meeting point (one imagines this is the case with most of them) involve such distinct landmarks as “a country road” and “two hills.”

I distinctly remember the summer immediately following my graduation from college. It was my first such season without academic bookends and I was hoping it would mark a restful reprieve from “real” work.

CareerCast just released its annual list of “the worst jobs in America,” and for the fourth year running, newspaper reporter came out on top.

The rankings take into account “hiring outlook, income, stress, and environment.” Newspaper reporters apparently face a bleak future as online media replaces print papers, fake news is more interesting than real news, and the population becomes increasingly illiterate (the latter is based on this writer’s first-hand observations).

There is paradox among 'outdoorsy' people that manifested itself to me in an indelible way over the weekend.

Being something of a 'crunchy con,' I took part in the Pennsylvania Environmental Council’s Public Lands Ride — a group bicycling event that tours riders through Moshannon State Forest — that happened to take place on opening day of archery deer season this year.

If you’ve ever read a headline along the lines of “Kardashian Family Worth Combined Zillion Dollars” and wondered how a gaggle of uneducated, tawdry, plastic people with a combined vocabulary of Joe Biden manages to account for, like, 10 percent of America’s GDP, you obviously haven’t visited a cosmetics store recently.

Pennsylvania winters can be unyielding. Though the extreme, single-digit temperatures and mounds of sometimes-onerous (but always beautiful) snow come and go, the bleak, overcast skies tend to overstay their welcome, hanging around like a monochromatic weight on one’s psyche.

I struggle to enjoy summer. So each year, when the last frost drifts away to Australia, or wherever it goes, I grit my teeth and remind myself of the most “hot girl summer” moment I’ve ever had, and look forward to reliving the pleasure of lawn mowing that brought it about:

There is a property on the outskirts of my little Central Pennsylvania town that I’ve always thought was a junkyard. At last month’s township supervisors’ meeting, I learned the couple of acres bestrewn with broken-down old vehicles, rusting tractor trailers, an off-kilter mobile home, some dilapidated campers, scattered mechanical accessories, a dumpster and a trampoline is actually someone’s home.

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up.

Winter’s bleakest days have set in. “The holidays” are a distant memory. Rose-colored resolutions to wake up earlier, eat healthier and exercise have gone the way of Dry January — all a wash, as you quickly discovered the only antidote for your Seasonal Affective Disorder was something equally cold and dark.

There’s nothing like the sound of automobile engines at wide-open throttle, whirring by like a squadron of World War Two fighter jets in dive-bomb mode. But at the Lime Rock Park racetrack, the adrenaline-pumping hum is made even more riveting by the fact that you hear the overture of baritone bees before you see what’s making it.

The results are in and nature (i.e. God) wins again. A Bureau of Labor Statistics survey has found that lumberjacks and farmers are the happiest, least stressed, and most fulfilled workers, further evidencing that everything we need to be joyful and satisfied in this life is not manmade. Nor does it have much if anything in common with the prevailing culture.