The Register had a heartwarming story yesterday about Dr. Mel. The longtime Channel 8 weatherman had been in hospice with life-threatening pneumonia but has apparently perked up enough to go home again.

Reading this, my mind flashed for a second to the Washington D.C. humorist, who was in hospice for five months, and wrote his last book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, while he was there.

But as the story (by stalwart Register reporter Ed Stannard) explained, hospices aren’t just for the terminally ill but for certain types of emergency care. Dr. Mel has lived for years with multiple myeloma, a

In any case, Dr. Mel has been happily cheating death for years now. I interviewed him several times after he won awards in the New Haven Advocate’s Best of New Haven readers’ polls. He told me that every time he outlived the time he’d been told he had left to live, he held a party.

Dr. Mel’s gifts to the study of meteorology have been massive. Managing his finances so that he could live on what he made from teaching, he used the money from his many media opportunities (Channel 8, numerous radio stations, a longrunning column in the Hartford Courant back when it had a Sunday magazine) to create opportunities for others to study weather forecasting. He built up the state’s only bachelor’s degree program in metereology (at Western Connecticut State University). He wrote the bestselling Complete Idiot’s Guide to Weather.

Mostly, he just made forecasting seem fun and sensible and not like rocket science.

Every time I’ve ever run into Dr. Mel—on the street, at the old Pilot Pen tennis tournament (where he was treated like a god on earth for his weather-predicting abilities), in the Advocate offices for those Best Of awards–he’s been effortlessly affable. Down to earth, not head-in-the-clouds.

Dr. Mel retired from teaching last year, and from broadcasting a couple of months ago. Here’s to him kicking up his heels and resting around the house for many cold, warm, partly sunny and other days to come.