If we can believe the latest forecasts from The National Weather Service, our area is heading into a warmer spell for the rest of this week, with a high of 53 degrees today, 55 on Wednesday, 60 on Thursday and 53 on Friday before cooling off slightly with a high of 58 and 49 Sunday.

Accuracy of projections from weather forecasters is always a big “if.” Mother Nature is notoriously fickle, but the outlook is far better than the bitter cold that has kept our weather below freezing in recent weeks.

The outlook for rain is 15% chance of precipitation on Wednesday and in the single digits until Monday of next week, when there is a 24% outlook.

Time to get the Harley out for a ride? Hope so, but that depends on the patch job the doc did on my leaking left ankle, but he says the clear fluid that has been spotting our sheets is not embryonic fluid but some water that my body is retaining, and we will know in a followup visit next week. Apparently, one of the two felines who consider our house theirs, decided to sharpen his our her claws on my ankle while I was sleeping. Wife Amy and I have many battle scars from our pets, who think playing includes clawing and biting.

But visits to the doctor also reminds us that advancing age creates new problems and threats, especially on bodies that have been damaged in accidents and physical incidents related to work and/or play. I have annual brain scans required by a traumatic brain injury suffered in a motorcycle-cow crash nine years, along with enough metal in my right leg to set off most metal detectors (but not, strangely, the one at the entrance to the courtroom at the county courthouse that I will enter this afternoon to cover a trial for The Floyd Press).

I walk with a limp from multiple accidents, including the motorcycle crash in 2012, a helicopter that fell from the sky about 60 years ago and an encounter with a rock wall in a sports car back in the 1970s. The left shoulder is “frozen” because of a botched repair by the same sports medicine surgeon in Arlington who “repaired” Washington quarterback Joe Thiesman’s badly broken leg in those same years. My sports injury came at a collision at home plate in a softball game that left me with a broken arm and dislocated shoulder.

Amy has a back injury that came from trying to stop a large crate that was sliding off a truck lading ramp at Family Dollar in Floyd, and she has suffered other injuries in her career job as an actress and later as a buyer for the May Company department chain while we lived in Arlington.

She figures her injuries have used up about seven or eight of her “nine lives” and mine at 15 or 16 of mine. Negative numbers aren’t good.

But Walter McPeak, my maternal grandfather, once said: “Son, if you’re not living on the edge, you are taking up too much room on the platform of life.”