A Week of Climate

So our Saturday morning is rainy, a bit cold and blustery and drizzly, the sort of day that seems best viewed from inside a window.

This has been a week of climatic extremes, the like of which I cannot recall since we arrived here 7.5 years ago.  Precisely within in the period of a week, we went from a nighttime low of 17 F and daytime high of 32 F to a nighttime low of 50 F and daytime high of 80 F. We have had incredibly blustery winds and frozen standing pots of water, showers of rain and moments where I had to engage the air conditioning because the interior of the car was hot.

It is like we have had the entire year in the space of a week.

Part of it, of course, is the wonderful fact that we now live where such things are possible - in Old Home, the climate in general was much different due to prevailing winds and currents:  winter was winter, summer was summer.  It was the classic "Mediterranean Climate" of Italy (and no, we did not used to live in Italy, although that would have been very cool indeed).  Here we live much farther inland away from the moderating ocean winds and currents. It is also much more flat:  there lies very little between us and Canada, for example, or us and the Gulf of Mexico.  Therefore, any weather that is coming has nothing more to stop it than me raising my hand and crying out "Cease" - which, for the record, is fairly ineffective.  

It makes for a different way of living, of course -and makes things like running a garden a nightmare (Really.  I long for my Mediterranean, predicable climate).  The bright side, of course, is the adventure of what the next week will bring.

As long as it is not ice...