Posts Tagged “Rain”

The sun comes up in the east and sets in the west. Between those times it sits in the sky and shines down on us. Sim­ple facts of reality.

With that as the guid­ing prin­ci­ple, I always thought that Florida’s slo­gan: “The Sun­shine State” was just dumb. “We have some­thing every­one else has too!”

Hav­ing never lived any­where out­side of Florida as I grew up, I just thought every­where got the sun. Sure some places were more cloudy than Florida, and other places had snow, but they got the sun too. The sun was sim­ply a con­stant for me as a child. Sure a rain storm blows through but we got plenty of vit­a­min D. And I never thought about just how much sun there was, except for the unbear­able heat which our blessed air con­di­tion­ers bat­tled endlessly.

So when we moved to Seat­tle, I con­cep­tu­ally under­stood that I would see less of the sun as it rained. But keep in mind all three times I’d been to visit Seat­tle the weather had been mainly beau­ti­ful. Sure there was some rain but it was tem­pered with gor­geous days, and dur­ing my visit the gor­geous days eas­ily out­weighed the rain.

When we arrived here, we were gifted with a string of gor­geous clear weather days dur­ing which to move into our place. Once that was done, well, Seat­tle showed her true colors.

Rain.

Rain rain rain.

In Florida a rain shower would last for an hour, if a large storm sys­tem set­tled over Florida it might last for a few days and it would be mis­er­able down­pour for most of it but then it would peter out and the sun would return.

The rea­son is that these show­ers form over the ocean, the water evap­o­rates from the ocean and rises into the sky to form clouds. Now due to tem­per­a­ture and pres­sure dif­fer­ences between ocean and land the rain gets drawn to land and across the state to be pulled back out to sea, or pulled apart in fairly lit­tle time. All the sand and the humid­ity cre­ates the thun­der­storms and light­ning we’re famous for, but they rarely last more than an evening because of the penin­sula of our land allow­ing for unhin­dered travel with pres­sure changes.

Here in Seat­tle, with the ocean to the west and the Cas­cade moun­tains basi­cally box­ing us in, well, there is only hin­dered travel. The rain comes in off the ocean or the sound and crosses over Seat­tle only to find itself blocked in by the moun­tains. So where it might be gone in a few hours, it ends up sit­ting here and churn­ing as more rain comes in off the ocean.

That’s my com­pletely unpro­fes­sional, une­d­u­cated, unmete­o­ro­log­i­cal expla­na­tion for how this all works, I could be wrong.

With this stag­nant rain I’ve had to adjust over the past four months. The biggest and quite frankly the eas­i­est learn­ing point was that in Florida, when it rained you only ven­tured out if you had to because those show­ers would quickly drench you. In Seat­tle, rain is sim­ply part of real­ity. The rain isn’t a soak­ing rain, it’s more like a fine mist usu­ally such that with a jacket of some sort it’s hardly an issue to ven­ture out and walk your dogs or run to the store.

I’ve begun to really real­ize how much I miss Florida’s sun. Not to be con­fused with miss­ing the heat, humid­ity, mos­qui­toes and bad dri­vers — just the sun and its light.

I’m promised that this rainy weather will be done by July, and then we’ll be ready to enjoy three months of the most per­fect weather in the world. Seri­ously. Every­one who hears me bemoan the rain promises me that in three months I will become ready to accept nine months of rain.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and the peo­ple I know and work with — it’s just the weather I’m grip­ing about.