According to groundhog.org, Punxsutawney Phil has seen his shadow 100 out of 116 times. Back in the late 1800s, there was a lull in activity regarding the groundhog’s schedule where there was no report. By 1900, the tradition officially began and we’ve been wondering since then if this lovely creature will see his shadow. Last year, Punxsutawney Phil did a horrible job “forecasting” our pattern when he did see his shadow, thus giving us “six more weeks of winter.” In reality, that never occurred as the contiguous United States had its fourth warmest winter on record. In fact, February 2012 provided the contiguous U.S. widespread warmer-than-average temperatures with twenty-seven states in the Northern Plains, Midwest, Southeast and Northeast having winter temperatures ranked among their ten warmest. The official website of this friendly groundhog states that Punxsutawney Phil has predictions that are accurate “100% of the time, of course!” However, I guess we will ignore last year’s failure and pretend it never happened!

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