We’re gonna pay for this…or is this payback?

..Ramblings about the weather.

Spring arrived a month early and it’s going strong.  Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed coming out of late season basketball games to warm air, nice warm, humid breezes out of the south and tree frogs singing away.  I like not having to put on four or five layers and the insulated wind pants to go running. I’m happy if it stays warm enough to avoid ice on the roads. I HATE sleet and freezing rain. Other drivers tend to be fools and icy streets mean no running in the workout routine.  Snow I don’t mind--up to a point.

That point is when the skies open and dump four or five inches while I’m in Shelbina or Macon or Fulton or O’Fallon doing a basketball game and still have to drive home. Slowly. In a couple cases, it’s fair to say that I drove home through three or four inches of what the forecasters claimed was “partly cloudy” or “a few flurries”.

Area residents old enough to remember tell about a similar warm, early spring in 1945. That was punctuated by a tornado cutting through downtown Quincy. That storm did some damage across other parts of Adams County too. Payback?

Or, you can argue that the warm early spring is a peace offering after 22 inches of snow in one shot to start Februrary 2011.

Weather seems to be pretty good at evening things out around here. The summer of ’88 brought some blistering high temperatures around western Illinois and Missouri. Not long after I started here at KHMO in 1989, we had the Great Cold Wave of ’89. 20 below air temperatures weren’t unusual. I remember working the overnight shift during that cold wave and seeing first hand that it is not too cold to snow when it’s well below zero. Having to go up on the roof at 2 a-m and sweep snow out of the satellite receiver dish provided enough evidence to bust that little weather myth.

Calling the Hannibal Cavemen  games over the last two seasons on khmoradio.com gives examples of the weather evening things up. Rain seemed to go with Cavemen baseball in 2010. Harold and I became very proficient at covering or disassembling the play by play gear in a hurry. When we moved up into the grandstand last year, that seemed like an unneeded skill—until the second Friday of the season when it rained so hard that you couldn’t see the center field fence. A couple weeks later, Channel 7’s Do Or Die Bowl took a storm delay at Culver Stockton College. A couple night’s later, another major storm literally blew through. Then it stopped raining. July was pretty hot—even by local standards. So was August. Didn’t have to mow my yard from July 4th until after Labor Day.

Mother Nature is evening that out by making it necessary for me to mow my yard in March. Payback?

One of the great things about living in the Midwest is that the weather can be a lot of things. Boring is not one of them.