I look at my weather app every night to reassure myself that the next day is going to live up to Alaskan Summer. Until you have lived through Alaskan Winter, especially in the Interior, you haven't looked forward to Summer. Not the way we do up here. Seriously. We put on flip flops and T-shirts when the temperatures hit 40 above. Some of us do. Given that I'm already a pale Northern European type, you really don't want to see my sick white legs. You don't. I'll even put that tan lotion on them to keep you from gacking should I wear shorts. I'm considerate that way.
Every night the Yahoo weather app (because the Weather Underground serving the Apple weather app is always, always wrong wrong wrong) says in great detail, with maps and cute little icons and spinning windmills, how it's going to be partly cloudy/sunny and isn't going to rain. And every morning I wake up thinking, "Man! It's too dark outside!" and then I hear rain.
Honestly, this has to stop. There are 80,000 people in and around Fairbanks who suffered the Non-Summer of 2014, where we got 400% of our normal rainfall. This is an actual, non-exaggerated figure. I had mushrooms everyfreakingwhere. I had a river running down the driveway and under my front porch. Trees were losing limbs from the weight of water. When you go through the long dark of winter only to have a long dark summer, too, it makes you question your sanity. It was so bad I even considered moving back to Eugene. EUGENE! (silent screams)
So, Mother Nature, or should I say, because of climate change, Mother Unnatural, we have done our rain thing and we are SO DONE. Was it not enough? The soil is so super-saturated that this year thousands of us who live in dirt roads and have gravel driveways are coping with giant, upheaving, rutty, muddy messes that can't be fixed until things dry out. If you try to grade stuff like that you end up with a mud pit capable of swallowing VWs, Subarus, and all Two-Door Specks that folks drive in the summer to save on gas.
It's June already. There is July and then Fall begins in August! So get it together Mama! Quit the dripping and bring on the heat! I need to brown up my legs so as not to traumatize my friends and neighbors!
