We Have No Spring or Fall Here

I am going to complain about the weather today, and not just about winter. Snow in late March and even early April is not the least bit atypical in this area, and today is no exception. When I went to bed last night it was raining and turning into little ice pellets, and this morning when I woke up the car was buried under several inches of ice and snow. The real crappy part is how the weather was so nice for a week and melted most of the snow and it started to look like the winter was over, and now we’re back to very below normal temps and adding onto one of the worst winters in the history of Minnesota. It was all a big tease!

Now I know that for every dozen of us who hate the snow and want it to be nice out, there’s a Christian Huseby or Josh Kleve out there who is celebrating the late snowfall, plus a few natives to the area who claim “this is nothing!” or “I’m from the Midwest, I’m used to it.” But most people seem to be in agreement that it sucks. Even those who are smiling ear-to-ear have to be concerned about the threat of massive flooding in the area.

Now before you go calling me out on being hypocritical, read on! While I am sick of the winter, I am also not much of a fan of the sweltering summer. For every blog post I’ve written over the years about hating snow, there’s probably one where I’m equally distressed about apartment temps over 100 degrees and AC not doing any good and waking up in a puddle of sweat.

It seems there is hardly any middle ground here. It’s either winter or summer in full force, with maybe one or two weeks of actual spring or fall weather separating the two. How many days of the year do we have temps in the 50s? It seems like very few. A week in mid-April and a week in late October, maybe?

Instead of living in the land of extreme weather, where we rarely experience a day of “normal” conditions, right on par with average, wouldn’t it be nice to live somewhere just the opposite where there were very few extremes and it was almost always mild? (I think “average” here is considered the mid-point between the either unseasonably cold or unseasonably hot weather… we don’t usually experience the posted average.)

According to some minimal research that I just did, the optimal place to live in the US for my ideal weather year-round is coastal California. Apparently the whole southern Pacific Coast, from San Diego up to San Francisco is the place to be for 50s-70s, but with that you do have frequent earthquakes, mudslides, forest fires, etc. Others say that the area between Las Cruces and El Paso is similar weather-wise but without the recipe for natural disaster.

Lauren, should we move to southeastern New Mexico? I am really up for it at this point. Seriously. Screw the Midwest.