For people who live in such a (relatively) temperate place, the folks in my corner of the world certainly do love to complain about the weather. A couple of weeks ago it was too cold (this, of course, being a relative thing...being the thin-blooded lot that we are, "too cold" means anything much below 60 degrees...a laughable concept to those living in places where 60 degrees in January would be a happenstance worthy of much awe, discussion, and fanfare.)
And then, as mentioned in this space, it was too wet. The rains seemed, for a scant few days anyway, like they were never going to end. Cars skidded into each other on slick freeways, mud slid down hills occasionally taking precariously balanced homes with it, waterlogged trees became uprooted and tumbled down across byways, surely it was a sign of the apocalypse...and then, as it always does, it stopped.
And now, for many about town, it's "too hot" (the official high temperature here yesterday was 87) with grumbling about the Santa Ana winds (hot, dry winds...actually more like warm, insistent breezes in this case...that sweep off the desert and scour the skies clean while drying out our lips and forcing us to wear sandals and shorts when we go out in the winter's evening to sip iced tea and frothy lattes in outdoor coffeehouses.)
TV weathermen...who get too much credit and too much blame for the weather when, all of their computers and deliberately arcane jargon notwithstanding, they're making glorified guesses...will continue to blather on and we, forever unsatisfied, will always find a reason to complain about the weather. It has always been thus and thus shall it ever be.
4 comments:
I sometimes think about the weather you people get. And by "you people" I mean everybody outside of New England. And by "weather" I guess I mean pretty much any act of God.
There are mudslides, earthquakes, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, blizzards, extreme temperatures... am I missing anything?
All we get is freezing cold and snow. I'll take that over the other stuff any day. I consider us pretty lucky here when the only thing we really have to worry about is the occasional blizzard.
I see you're from Illinois, so maybe you're familiar with this concept. Do your weather people do what they do here? When there's some major event going on, they'll go outside and stand in it, as if to show their defiance to the weather Gods. Of course, they're really just tempting Them! :)
Yeah, give them a little rain or flooding or some such and our TV weatherpeople put on their shiny, rarely used waders and raincoats and do live, intrepid standups from the scene, wind and water pelting their earnest "look-ma-I-really-am-a-journalist" faces. Most of the time, though, they just stand in front of their blue screens and seem a wee bit self-conscious about getting paid to day "it's going to be 72 and sunny tomorrow" on more days than they would care to count.
Aw geez - and we have winds gusting to 130 km per hour and rain (gale) and we are complaining that it is too WARM for this time of year.
Geez!
87 F - warm Santa Ana winds - aaaarrrrggghhhh!
(Forgot to post the temperature) 40 F
And just tonight, I was remembering what January in Chicago was like ..... brrrrrrrr ..... lots of wind and lots of snow and lots of COLD!
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