How’s the Weather?

Picture a giant quadrilateral (or lopsided rectangle, if you’re not geometrically inclined) covering the United States. The upper left corner is Seattle; the lower left corner is San Diego. The lower right corner is somewhere in Florida, let’s say Sarasota. And the upper right corner is in New England, in my favorite place: New Fairfield, Connecticut.

Having spent at least a few days in each of these places, I can tell you conclusively that I would rather be here.

There are many reasons I feel this way. One reason is weather.

Some people have described San Diego weather as “perfect.”

I don’t know these people personally, but they appear to be typical southern Californians: shallow, boring, and a little weird. These are the type of people who imagine that different rocks have healing powers when you wear them.

The truth is, San Diego has no weather. The average temperature ranges from 58f to 72f. There is almost no rain.

“How’s the weather?” is supposed to be a conversation-starter, but when it is the same day after day that leaves people with nothing to talk about. So when people talk about San Diego’s perfect weather, they are being… inventive. They are making stuff up, like rocks with magical powers.

This lack of weather is ominously reminiscent of descriptions of the Garden of Eden. And we all know how that ended.

The unchanging climate of Southern California makes it possible to live in a nudist colony. On the downside there are droughts, uncontrollable forest fires, mudslides, and earthquakes.

Sarasota actually does have seasons. That makes it a bit more interesting than San Diego.

There are two seasons in Florida. Some people talk about “wintering” in Florida, but they are really referring to weather in other parts of the country. Of the two seasons, only one has a name: hurricane season. In both seasons, the weather is “perfect” in the San Diego sense, for outdoor activity, except that it can get hotter (average temperatures range from 62f to 82f) and there is at least some chance of rain every day.

That is why the Tampa Bay Rays play baseball, an outdoor sport, indoors.

Florida is a peninsula (surrounded by water on three sides), half of it is swampland, and while it seems to rain enough, the state is in the middle of a severe drought.

Hurricane season goes from June 1 to November 30. Most days during hurricane season are just like days the rest of the year, except that hotel rooms are less expensive. Sometimes there’s a hurricane. Then it is more rainy and windy.

The roof of Tropicana Field is rated to withstand winds up to 115 miles per hour. You could watch a baseball game during a hurricane, but you might have some trouble finding your car after the game.

The National Hurricane Center recently announced the prediction for the 2009 hurricane season. They are calling for a “near-normal Atlantic hurricane season… have your disaster plan ready.”

If your job involves predicting the weather, here is a safe way to keep it:

“In its initial outlook for the 2009 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June through November, NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center calls for a 50 percent probability of a near-normal season, a 25 percent probability of an above-normal season and a 25 percent probability of a below-normal season.”

What kind of prediction is that?

The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) requested budget for 2009 was $4.1 billion. That included an extra $5.3 million to “improve hurricane forecasts.”

I could be just as accurate, and you would only have to pay me half of that.

Several years ago I spent a week in Seattle as a guest of Microsoft.

The entire week, the only clouds in the sky were the ones skimming off the peak of Mount Rainier, 54 miles away.

The weather was otherwise very nice.

Seattle has a reputation for rain. For example: How do you predict the weather in Seattle? If you can see Mount Rainier, it’s going to rain. If you can’t, it already is.

Not when I was there.

Maybe the people of Seattle invented the rain story to keep everyone else away.

Seattle coffee snobbery is part of the lie. They need coffee because it’s always so rainy. So of course they’re experts.

They’re so desperate to keep newcomers out that they even named the nearby volcano Mount Rainier.

They must think we’re a bunch of fools.

That volcano is active and will erupt some day, dooming a whole bunch of selfish, coffee-drinking liars to a fiery end.

Seattle weather doesn’t scare me. But the nearby suburb of Redmond, WA is Microsoft headquarters. So returning to Seattle is, for me, a little like Frodo from “Lord of the Rings” wanting to make a return trip to Mordor.

New Fairfield’s got New England weather, which is to say, real weather. Calendars mean something here. There is always something to talk about. Our winters are cold and our summers are hot: lowest recorded temperature was -18f in 1994, and the highest was 106f in 1995.

Seasons? We’ve got ‘em all.

This year we even had monsoon season. The past weekend turned out nice, but the rest of June was full of thunderstorms.

With so many days of rain in June, local gardeners have watched their vegetable patches wash away or turn into muddy ponds. They’re looking for advice.

All I can suggest is this:

It is too late in the year to sow cuttings for a new cranberry bog. For those of you with a bog already in place, weeding is your most important summertime activity.

If you are lucky enough to have two inches of water in your garden, you might try growing rice. Just toss it in and wait. Rice takes about four months to grow, unless you planted white rice.

Or, you can give up gardening and start building an ark.