BEDA Day 8: Weather is weird

They, whoever "they" are, always say, "If you don't like the weather in Ohio, wait five minutes and it'll change." Having lived my entire life in Ohio (save for the 10 weeks I lived in Ecuador), I know that's pretty much true. I've grown up in central Ohio, which has its own brand of totally unpredictable weather. I went to college in the northeastern part of the state, which has an entirely different brand of unpredictable weather. I learned at a pretty young age that no weather forecast is sacred, and that Ohio is a state of extremes. We had two days off from school during my senior year of high school because it was temperatures were around 0 degrees Fahrenheit, officially too cold to stand outside and wait for the bus. Two weeks ago, I got sick when we had to take the kids at work to the pool when it was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, with a heat index of around 107. (The heat index is a calculation that combines the temperature on the thermometer with the humidity level.) Last week I was driving home from work in pouring rain while it was brilliantly sunny...and I didn't even see a rainbow, I might add. Disappointing to say the least.

I always think it's funny to see reactions to our weather from people who live outside the Midwest. In July 2007 I attended the Presbyterian Youth Triennium, a tri-annual (is that a word?) gathering of youth from around the country and the world. It took place at Purdue University in Indiana, and all of my fellow Ohioans were highly amused by all of the people from the Southwest who couldn't handle the humidity, even though they're used to temperatures well over the mid-80s, which is what we were having that week. The following summer, my family had a reunion in Indiana, and my cousin Matt, a native Californian, just about had a heart attack when he saw a weather forecast that called for 90% humidity. I told him he'd have to get used to it, since he was about to start college in Pittsburgh. (He still gets really excited by snow!) Finally, my friend Annika, also a native Californian, who transferred to B-W last year, was really scared back in October when there were severe thunderstorms and a possibility of tornadoes. Now, I will never deny the destructive power of twisters, but I can count on one hand the number of times there's ever been one within fifty miles of where I was located at the time, compared to the hundreds or maybe thousands of tornado warnings I've been subject to during my life. I told her it was no big deal; it was super unlikely that any would be cited, and if we had to we'd just go down into the basement for a bit till the storm was over. Anyways, tornadoes weren't nearly as big a deal as the earthquakes they have to worry about in California. Annika assured me that earthquakes weren't anything to be worried about, but tornadoes were still terrifying.

In case you're wondering where all this is coming from, we're currently in the period of the year where hot temperatures mean that crazy huge cloudbursts can pop up at just about any time, like the one we had this evening. After that, everything goes back to being peachy keen.

I should mention that Cuenca, where I primarily spent time in Ecuador, also had crazy, crazy weather. It must be my lot in life.