When I moved to the Pacific Northwest nine years ago, I lamented at the time that it was a dark, damp, depressing region that didn’t believe in summer and made people want to kill themselves.  You see, moving from California to anywhere else is enough to make you fear never seeing the sun again.  I expected flannel.  I expected year-round hypothermia.  I expected lumberjacks.

What I got was a freezing cold winter followed by a mild spring and a luminous summer.  There was no flannel, I have yet to catch hypothermia, and I have only met one lumberjack (whose name was Paul, of all things).  In all, my adolescent histrionics were exaggerated and unnecessary because, even though the winter here is horrible and dark, it’s almost always redeemed by a gorgeous spring and perfect summer.

Except maybe this year.  I have a sinking suspicion that we may not have a summer this year.  We had a good and proper winter (I have the photos of two feet of snow on our deck to prove it!), and then two days of nice mild weather that we all thought would herald the triumphant return of spring, and then we had…snow.  And hail.  But mostly snow.

It’s almost mid-March, yet when I look out my window I see thick white flakes falling merrily to the ground.  Unlike during the winter, these flakes don’t make me want to sip hot chocolate and read a book.  These flakes make me want a giant blow dryer so I can resuscitate the flowers that started budding during the warm days and are now covered in unwelcoming pellets of hail.  These flakes make me want to knit twee little sweaters for my poor daffodils, who are ill at ease amid the cold and ice.

Winter has metastisized to other seasons this year.  Either that or spring got lost on its way back from Argentina (if you know what’s good for you, you won’t ask what spring was doing there).

Other than the weather, I don’t have much to report on.  Due to an unforeseen scheduling conflict, we were unable to go see Watchmenthis weekend.  We have rescheduled our date to a proper dinner-and-a-movie date for Tuesday, so I suppose my review of the movie will be coming on Wednesday.  I’d advise you to set your TiVo but I may be incorrect in my understanding of how those work.

We did have a chance to have dinner with my mom, step-father, and step-brother this weekend and that was a lot of fun.  As usual, we were the loudest table there and one of the very last customers to leave.  One of the things most people notice first about me is that I’m loud.  When you meet the rest of my family, it’s quickly apparent that being loud is not a quirk so much as it is a survival skill.

It’s one of the fundamental rules of my family that if you can’t say what you’re thinking louder than everybody else, it probably isn’t worth saying.  And I am nothing if not completely confident that every single thing I think is worth saying.