EXTREME WEATHER

The local news informs us that the weather in the Bay Area will be turning nasty. Rain and the possibility of thunderstorms. Plus cooler temperatures than normal. Which, if you are a tourist, is a horrible prospect; you only brought shorts, tee-shirts, and flip-flops. And naturally, as a Dutchman (though an American from birth), I myself am perfectly acclimatized to warm tropic weather such as we have in Java, the Costa Del Sol, and Groningen. Fer sure.

[Dutchman by ancestry and several years residence during my youth. Also by temperament, which may be a genetic defect or incurable disease. I'm traumatized, and I demand special consideration because of it. Cheese matters!]

Years ago when it hit eighty degrees Fahrenheit in North Brabant, my mother, who was used to the conditions of San Francisco and Berkeley when she went to college there, insisted that her children stay indoors to avoid sun-stroke. She deemed us rare temperate zone flowers or something. She'd be right at home in what we're being told to expect. Global warming would have upset her teacart.

[Having read about the ill-fated expedition to find a Northern passage (Willem Barents and Jacob Van Heemskerk, 1596-1597) my ideas about weather were a bit different. Climate-wise, we were in the centre of the tolerable universe.]

She would have been horified if to find out that I have been to the tropics and experienced typhoons. Which have never occured in civilized countries or the Netherlands.

The worst a reasonable person should expect is minor flooding.
Two or three inches on low-lying sidewalks at most.
And absolutely no massive mud-flows.
Or overflowing storm drains.

What I am expecting, given the tendency of the weather service here to mother-speak, is that precautionarily I should carry an umbrella if I go out in the middle of the night to smoke my pipe or look at the corpses of tourists caught in five minutes of steady drizzle while wandering about in their shorts, tee-shirts and flip-flops, oh the humanity.

Low to mid sixties throughout the week.
My mother would approve of this.
I shall need a sweater.



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