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Charlie Hatton
Watertown, MA
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I give up. This New England weather has finally beaten me into submission.
It snowed today. The fifth freaking day of April, and it snowed in Boston. These weren't flurries, either. No delicate gentle snowflakes, these. These were the wet, sticky, slappy sort of snowflakes. They thudded audibly against the windshield as I drove to work. They may have dented the hood, even. This precipitation wasn't screwing around.
"From now on, I'm going to storm onto my porch in the morning, wearing short pants, a parka, and one galosh, and demand, 'WHAT? WHAT THE HELL'S THE RIGHT ANSWER TODAY?!?'"
To be honest, the snow itself isn't the big problem here. I do have an issue, in principle, with seeing the white stuff this late in the year. 'April showers' should bring 'May flowers' -- not 'snow plowers', for crissakes. It's baseball season now, and there's no blizzards in baseball! So sure, the snow is troublesome.
Worse, though, are the wildly fluctuating temperatures. This weekend, we had 'seasonal' weather, in the mid-fifties.* On Monday, it was a warm and sunny seventy. Today -- thirty. There's no one on the planet, besides those equipped with a surname of Kennedy or Marcos, with a wardrobe wide enough to accomodate that sort of climatological claptrap.
I sure as hell don't, that's for certain. And I'm fed up with trying to outguess the weather monkeys over what to wear. From now on, I'm going to storm onto my porch in the morning, wearing short pants, a parka, and one galosh, and demand, 'WHAT? WHAT THE HELL'S THE RIGHT ANSWER TODAY?!?'
Some might say this week's wacky weather is simply proof of the old New England adage:
'If you don't like the weather now, just wait a bit. It'll change.'
Very cute and folksy, no doubt. I can readily imagine Grandpa Massachusetts in his rocker, with a Red Sox Nation shawl around his shoulders, dispensing such nuggets of wisdom to the wee ones gathered at his feet.
Except for one thing: that particular homey bit of fluff is true for ninety percent of the inhabitable land masses on the planet. Certainly, the weather's not going to change much in Antarctica or sub-Saharan Africa, no matter how long you wait around.
(For that matter, nothing much changes in Southern California weatherwise, either -- but there's no stupid adage in Southern California that starts with, 'If you don't like the weather...' If you don't like the weather there, they have you committed. Or ship you to Minnesota. Occasionally both.)
In the rest of the world, the weather changes. That's what scientists call 'seasons'. Seeeea-sons. My beef is simply this: if we only get four seasons, we shouldn't have to deal with three of them in the space of a week. The 'T-shirt and mittens' look is just dandy down at the sanitorium, but I'm not sure I should go to work that way.
Weather, you win. I'm putting on knee socks and a muumuu, and going back to bed. Somebody wake me when it's August, or even December. At least I'll know what the hell to wear outside.
(* The temperature tallies above are in Fahrenheit, obviously. I apologize to our friends across the pond. I'd convert to Celsius, really -- if only because it's a hell of a lot easier to spell -- but the math always ties me in knots.
'Take five-ninths of the number, add thirty-two, and subtract the barometric pressure expressed in milliliters of mercury on the third moon of Neptune,' or some such nonsense. I could never get it right. I'd have an easier time converting to Kelvin, and reporting how close we got to absolute zero today.)
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You rarely hear people referring to just one galosh. It seems like it's always the plural: "Don't forget your galoshes!" or some such. A single "galosh" sounds like a very intimate sort of disease, and very painful, if you ask me. Not that I have stayed up nights wondering about this sort of thing or anything, but why aren't "galoshes" more like "pants"? Not in the sense that galoshes are, or should become, at all like pants, but in that there's not really a singular of "pants." It's always a "pair of" 'em. I say we make "galoshes" follow the same rules, 'cause I'd prefer to never hear of a single "galosh" ever again. *shudder*
I love the snow under particular circumstances. Yesterday's snow didn't fall under any of those. It was APRIL and that nasty gross slushy snow. Awful. I'd rather it be a few degrees colder and have real snow, actually.
The problem with converting to Kelvin is that you have to FIRST convert to Celsius and then subtract 273.15. Or you could convert the Fahrenheit to Rankine (R=F+459.67 or something close) and then divide by 1.8 to get the Kelvin.
And you thought YOU were a nerd? I'm sitting here in a freakin' lab coat and safety goggles for Christssakes.
Southern CA ain't been that spiffy of a place of late either. Rain in April? And not hte warm spring showers, this is cold, hard rain . . with icy winds even. It's april and I still have my heater on at night. Global Warming my lily white arse!
So...are you storming out on your front porch wearing a striped rugby parka? Inquiring minds want to know.
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Haha. Please, come and visit northern Canada for a week! We haven't had a summer in eighteen months (but we did have a monsoon season last July), and this winter... didn't exist (although last year, the last snowfall came in May). A week ago, we got two feet of snow and built a snow cave. This week it's 17 degrees Celsius and we're in shorts.
You can sleep on the spare bed.