Officially, summer starts this year on June 20 at 11:32 p.m. EDT, but the child in all of us remembers that Memorial Day is the holiday around when school stops, and that starts summer.

Hooray! The longest episode of cargo ship constipation has ended! The “Ever Given” clogged up the Suez Canal worse than a steady diet of chunky cheeses, gummy white bread, and super glue.

Seems like the weather demands yet more attention. At the time of this writing on February 15, Dallas is six degrees colder than Anchorage, Alaska. Houston is only one degree warmer than the Alaskan city 4,132 miles to the northwest. New York City is 23 degrees warmer than Dallas.

After the (American) Thanksgiving holiday, we face days of turkey leftovers, the sprint to the Christmas holiday break, and, ultimately, the end of 2020.

Short week for those who celebrate Thanksgiving (with a small group, we hope) but the world spins on. Take a deep breath and get ready to sprint through the last few weeks until we finally escape 2020. But there’s no escaping newsbits, like the ones waiting below.

We’re rounding the corner to the end of the year, finally, and everyone’s fingers are crossed hoping 2021 is just as good as 2020 has been awful. Things are getting better already, if you judge by the fact the storm hitting Florida today is just Tropical Storm Eta and not Hurricane Eta.

We turned the corner on Halloween and Daylight Savings Time, meaning most of 2020 is behind us. In another day, all the TV and online ads will go back to selling us pickup trucks and beer and Christmas.

Of course, there’s another hurricane heading through the Gulf of Mexico, because 2020.

Now well into October, 2020 continues to be the annoying canker sore that never heals. Tropical storms Delta and Gamma are winding themselves up to hurricane levels in the already-battered Gulf. Someone please adjust the spanning tree algorithm and send them to the wildfires in California.

Congrats to NASA and SpaceX and Elon Musk. For the first time in 45 years, American astronauts ended their journey in the ocean rather than in Russia. On the other hand, Musk has managed to do what NASA first did with Mercury 3 in May 1961.