I have an app on my iPhone that gives me weather information. I can check the daily forecast, the weekly outlook and the two-week outlook. It even has a radar map. I love the radar map. It shows me exactly where the storm is and approximately where it will be over the next few hours.
I plan my day, and even my week, accordingly. I know what I can wear, what I can do and where I can go. Snowstorms and thunderstorms can no longer surprise me. I know when I can go swimming in the pond or go skating on it. Not that I have a pond, although I do have a Great Lake on the other side of town, and I neither swim in it nor skate on it. I do like to walk along the shores of it, however, and the weather app helps me decide if it’s feasible to do so. I don’t know how I managed to go through life without my weather app.
When I was small, I remember listening to the weather reports. They usually consisted of a few basic words: sunny with cloudy periods; chance of rain/snow. That was it; no barometric pressures, no wind chill factors, and no mental calculations of Celsius to Fahrenheit. The weather seemed simpler back then and we expected those surprise storms.
We’ve come a long way with our knowledge of weather. We have meteorologists that love to educate the public with full reports of what is happening in the atmosphere. We have funny weathermen who can make us groan at their silly jokes, no matter what the weather. And we have our own friends and relatives with whom we can commiserate when a snowstorm forces cancellations or when thunderstorms threaten a garden wedding. Heck, we even have a television network devoted to telling us what to expect!
How did we do it back in the day? Oh right, we would just step outside to see if we needed a jacket. If we got caught in a thunderstorm, well, we just got wet. And it didn’t matter what winter brought because we always wore our coat and boots. We could always rely on that trustworthy forecast: sunny with cloudy periods; chance of rain/snow.
Our weather reports have come a long way, but we’ll always have our funny weathermen. Like the one I remember from years ago who proclaimed, “Relative humidity is 65 percent, which means that 65 percent of relatives are sweating.” Groan.
© 2015 – All rights reserved Loretta Notto @ Mermaid Fingers