This past year, the weather has finally gotten to me. This comes as a surprise to myself because one of the reasons why I like New England is the varied seasons. For those of you not from the area, we typically get all four, with winter and summer sometimes bleeding into spring and fall respectively. I personally like spring and fall the most, which is why I have an attraction to San Diego – perpetual Spring. Anyway, the last decade or so seem to have shortened springs and falls, but not too bad. The fact is that in addition to the “nice” weather of sun and clouds, at any given time, we can have any of the following weather snafus…

Little known fact – well, “little known” if you haven’t known me for very long – but I’ve lived in Connecticut all my life. In fact, as the fates (or my own laziness) would have it, I live about 20 minutes from where I grew up and 15 minutes from the hospital I was born in. My parents were born and raised in the same town that I was born in. I guess that makes me a “Second Generation Townie” or maybe a Townie Twice Removed or something. It’s not that I’m opposed to living somewhere else – I just haven’t found very many place that would make me want to live there. Vegas has the most “pull” but so does Seattle, Tennessee and San Diego, all four for completely different reasons – hard to pick just one, ya know? About eight years ago, when the company I was working for decided relocated itself for business goals, I was taught that business is just that: business. It’s not your life; at least it’s not supposed to be. I decided that I would not uproot and disrupt my personal life, just for a “job”. Now there are exceptions to all these things, of course… maybe the “right” offer has yet to be made. So for the time being, as it’s been for years already, I’m living in New England.

Anyway the weather snafus in question:

• Hurricanes

• Tornados

• Dry Hurricanes (new thing, just happened last week)

• Ice storms (no snow; just ice)

• Blizzards

• Nor’easters (pseudo-hurricane, very damaging)

• Heat waves (sometimes lasting multiple weeks)

• Humidity (enough to make an amazon princess jealous)

No lie – we can get any of these during a given season. In fact we usually bump into at least one of these each season, but almost never in mass quantities – unlike NC, we usually don’t get bombarded with multiple storms during a month. One winter we had about 95 inches of snow; we got more than Buffalo, NY that year, which is just bizarre. Another year we had a storm that shut down the state for three days because we got slammed with three inches of ice – picture a cartoon where ya put a freezing coil in a town and pour water on it. The “dry” hurricane this past week had winds that were bad enough to knock out power for whole towns for days – just no rain like a normal hurricane. We’ve also had winters with temperatures in the 60 – 70 degree range. We’ve had whole weeks of 75 degrees and low humidity for summer months. Ya just don’t know, and that’s mostly good with me.

Yet the weather finally got to me these past few months, but not how you’d think. It’s the people that got to me – not the changes of the weather. See we had a cool start to summer (really an extended spring) and then all at once we hopped from 70 to 95, and then stayed there for days at a time. It was hot and humid. But here’s people walking around CT being surprised! And these aren’t new people to the area. These are the life’rs, like me. Well what the hell is wrong with these people? What’s changed? Why the surprise? Is this new heat? Did the local news discover something new about this particular blast of heat that makes it unique? It was August – that’s a summer month. People should be expecting heat in summer! Hey, last year the same exacting thing happened – it was hot and humid! There was a 90+ heat wave! So how can you be surprised? It’s New Heat! It must be New Heat! That’s the only possible explanation.

Now we’re in September, when things typically start to cool down a bit. We had a bit of a rain storm last night and it’s still going on today… got a few inches all in one blast. And yesterday, while I was out on a Sunday, and playing in the puddles, guess what I heard? Shock at the rain! This is new rain! This isn’t like the last rain storm that we had – we never get rain in Connecticut! We’ve never, ever seen it before? This is New Rain! How do I know this? Well not only were the people that I saw yesterday shocked that it would rain through the night (because New Rain lasts for a minimum of 12 hours at a time) but if you saw our traffic reports today you’d know it was New Rain. There were at least five accidents on Interstate 95 alone – if that many people crashed, the rain must be New Rain because they don’t know how to drive in it (obviously!)

I guess the lesson to be learned is that I’m ever-amused (or annoyed – nearly the same emotion these days) by the things that amaze other people… I don’t know if it’s because they don’t appreciate their surroundings or the just live moment to moment – either way it gives the same reaction… how else could a heat wave in the middle of summer actually surprise someone? Either they don’t realize that it happens ever year or they’ve forgotten what the last summer was like. Same net effect – New Heat!

Personally, I’m looking forward to the winter… I hear that the old Black Ice will be replaced with New Ice and that New Snow will make things even colder than last years snow…