Weather

 This time, of the terrestrial kind.

My phone went off at about 3:30 AM this morning, just about the time Marianne wakes up to get ready for work - she has to be at the dialysis clinic at 5:00 AM.  It was the WCBS Weather app on my phone, warning of a severe thunderstorm warning. A quick glance revealed that it was for Rockland and Westchester counties in NY.

When I awoke at 5:00 AM and headed downstairs to the kitchen, I heard a loud kind of whooshing sound. At first I thought the compressor in the refrigerator was going bonkers, but it turned out to be rain hitting the skylight in the rec room. It was raining hard!

It seems we've had a lot of wild and wooly weather this summer. Of course, you'll always have people whose first words out of their mouths are "climate change", but I remember summers like this when I was but a youngster. I remember one summer in particular when I must have been either 5, 6 or maybe 7 years old. It seemed like we got thunderstorms just about every day that summer. And the reason for my memory is that my Mom was deathly and I mean DEATHLY frightened by thunderstorms.  

There was a time when she was a little girl and answered the telephone during a storm and she received a bad shock. She carried that fear with her for her whole life and whenever a thunderstorm was upon us, particularly the bad ones, she would herd my sister and me and herself down to the basement. I also remember one time that same summer when the sky got so black like nighttime, that she hustled the three of us next door to my aunt and uncle's house, as she was afraid to be alone, even with us kids. The grown ups stayed upstairs and my sister and I and our two cousins played in the basement. That storm was so bad that during a particularly close lightning strike, it caused the lightbulb in an overhead ceiling fixture to burst.

The point of all this is, that whenever someone panics about the weather and claims that this is new and that the world is coming to an end, I just chuckle to myself. Yes, the weather HAS been like this before, it's just that you weren't around to see it! I remember the 60's being particularly bad for hurricanes affecting New Jersey because our basement was leaky and I spent a lot of time picking up water.

It's all cyclical and there will be periods of violent weather and not so violent weather. You just have to keep an eye on the big picture. And as for climate change? Yep! Certainly! And you know what? It's been changing since "Day One" and will keep on changing until "Day Last", and other than being the best and most responsible stewards of the planet that we can be - there's not much we can or should do about it.

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!