Say it isn't so! The legislature is considering naming an official groundhog? For the love of all that is holy, Mr. Patrick, veto that bill!

OK, maybe I'm still bitter over my own nightmarish experience with Massachusetts's last attempt at forecasting the weather with a Drumlin Farm groundhog, Cochituate Chuck:

Note: Some of you may have read me kvetching about this already; if so, hit the back button now.

Back in the day, when I was but a mere cub reporter at the Middlesex News in Framingham (you kids now know it as the MetroWest Daily News), the paper's cartoonist, Dave Granlund, was friends with Channel 4 weathercherub Bruce Schwoegler. They hatched this idea to beat Punxatawney Phil: They'd get some groundhog at, yes, of course, Drumlin Farm, to declare the six weeks of whatever. Although the farm is in Lincoln, they decided to name the beast Cochituate Chuck. Maybe Lincoln Larry or Drumlin Dan just didn't have the same oomph, or something.

In its second year, I got the short straw - I had to cover Chuck's prognostications. So I got up at some ungodly hour (although not as ungodly an hour as the time I went out into some woods off 128 in Weston in search of a moose with our outdoors writer, but that's another story), drove to Lincoln and watched as some Drumlin Farm worker took this poor, sleepy mound of fur out of its cage in a nice warm barn and took it outside, where she deposited it in a bucket that had been stuck in the snow.

Yes, a bucket stuck in the snow, sort of half-heartedly covered up to make it look like a burrow, instead of, well, a bucket in the snow. Poor Chuck made some feeble move out of the bucket, no doubt trying to shake off hibernation and get back into its nice warm cage. Bruce and Dave conferred, declared a forecast and I drove down to the newsroom to write up the big news.

Being used to reporting just the facts, ma'am, I described the events leading up to the forecast, including the way th the groundhog had been taken out of a cage and put in a bucket in the snow. My story ran on the front page, along with a photo that clearly showed the groundhog was lying in a bucket in the snow.

All hell broke lose. Granlund accused me of ruining the magic, of stealing this special moment from the children. I was, clearly, an Evil Person. He stopped talking to me. For years, he wouldn't even acknowledge my presence if we happened to pass in the hall. I think that was also the end of Cochituate Chuck's forecasting (he may have held on for one more year, but obviously, I had destroyed a Massachusetts institution all by myself).

So please, Governor, just don't! Think of the reporters who will have to cover this faux event. Think of the children!