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Surfacing
I am, like most of you, a meteorological outsider: firmly planted at about 1000mb. That is not to say that my head is not sometimes in the clouds…or that the title of this blog is not some oblique intention to tempt fate to hitch me a ride on a hurricane hunter some day, or a desire to be reincarnated as a migrating bird.
A Famous Writer once supposedly said that everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. I don't think that's true; lots of people carry umbrellas at least some of the time. And, of course, 100 years later, there's global warming.
Not only am I just as curious about the weather as the next person, I've become even more fascinated as of late. Internet links to satellite loops, visual feasts showing disjointed movies of our dancing atmosphere, tipped the scales for me. Shortly after that, a hurricane tried, and came awfully close, to washing my home town into the Gulf of Mexico. Suddenly weather, when not right in my face, was finding subtle ways of weaving itself into all my spare time. My list of acquaintances became meteorologist-and-oceanographer-heavy. My morning routine began to include oddities such as reading the TWD, without tripping over phrases like "WLY," and reviewing the latest forecast maps and satellite imagery. Internet links, originally filed under the simple folder, "weather," multiplied, and had to be reorganized, many times. As autumn turned to winter and now to summer, I became familiar with the gradual seasonal shift in weather patterns. Still, I remained on my side of the border, without the necessary knowledge for more than a glimpse here and there, as if on a moving train. Now, akin to Jem and Scout making commando-like forays into the Radley back yard, or Dorothy tentatively meeting the Munchkins (although this new world is not anything as normal as Oz), I make the occasional day trip. Hope you enjoy perusing my finds.
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