Another summer has come and gone and now it's back to school.

Back to school means different things to different people. To the parents, it's 10 months of relief from a two-month pain in the ass.

To the kids, it's a chance to see your friends again for the first time in months. See who got tall, who started shaving and who grew boobs.

To me, though, it's a dark day. Why? Because like clockwork, in approximately eight to 14 days I know I'm gonna be sicker than a dog.

Cold and flu season is no mystery. It has nothing to do with shifting weather patterns.

It has to do with the human virus factories going back into the general population with the rest of the little nose pickers.

Classrooms are much more than places to learn. They're breeding grounds for illness: 32-man viral circle jerks.

Little Timmy has a big gooey sneeze on his mitt, then borrows Suzy's pen.

Suzy makes peepee and doesn't wash her hands, then turns in her book report to Mr. Whittingham, who takes that urine-soaked, mucus-glazed document home to his wife, to whom he proceeds to make sweet, sweet love.

She doesn't shower that morning because she washed her hair the night before, then she goes to work the next day, but stops at Tim Hortons to grab a coffee.

It's the very same Tim Hortons that I go to, and from the door knob outside, I pick up one of Little Timmy's ninth-generation boogers.

I get to work and rub my eyes 'cause it's so freakin' early, and then the next day, scratchy throat, runny nose, and a cough. I'm sick.

Kids, wash your hands. Parents - if your kids are sick, keep 'em home. 'Cause I don't wanna get sick from an eight degrees of Kevin Bacon chain-reaction virus.

In the meantime ... I'll just shut my big yap.

What exactly is the Farmer's Almanac?

Well, good news and bad news.

The bad news is it's gonna be a colder fall than usual, but the good news is it's going to be a warmer and drier winter than we've been used to.

Put away your tuques and mittens, cancel that trip to Mexico in January and maybe hold off on the snowblower purchase. It's gonna be a cakewalk winter.

So says the Farmer's Almanac. What exactly is the Farmer's Almanac?

It's one of these things that we always hear about, that everybody refers to, but nobody really knows what the hell it is.

So lemme get this straight, Josh Classen, a meteorologist, a scientist, with years and years of schooling, and satellites and scanners, and all sorts of cool, graphics and green screens and, above everything else, science ... he - a scientist, like Doc Brown and Einstein and Louis Pasteur - at best is a crap shoot to tell me if I'm gonna need an umbrella at the Eskies game.

But we're supposed to trust some mystery book to tell me what the weather's gonna be a year and a half from now?

Well, how about Yukon's Almanac? I've got a beer can that I've cut in half, some old KFC chicken bones and some pebbles.

I'm gonna shake up the bird bones and stones and based on the positioning of them, I'm going to extrapolate the predicted snowfall for the giant slalom Jan. 24, 2010 at the Olympic games in Vancouver.

In the meantime ... I'll just shut my big yap.