I am writing this (late) in the first half of April, less than a month after the start of Spring, and we’ve got our first week fully in the 70s every day. Not only that, but there’s chances for thunderstorms severe enough that whatever weather app I look at has some kind of warning for every day and daily forecasts with cocerning things like “Scattered severe thunderstorms” or “destructive winds” or “high likelihood for tornadoes” which is kind of a lot. I had to wear a sweatshirt when I went outside just a week ago and I’m a weirdo who wears shorts and short-sleeve t-shirts in the winter! It was cold enough to warrant wearing warmer clothes for the drive out in the morning or while I waited for my car to heat up in the evenings. Now, we’ve got weather more in line with the first month of Summer than any part of Spring except maybe a few rare (but more and more common as the years progress) occasions toward the end of the season. And all I can really do is plan when to close my windows to capture as much of the cool air as possible, turn on my AC, and flip my ceiling fans to spinning in the summer/cooling direction. And enjoy wearing the new shorts I bought since I finally, after wearing every pair I had to rags, found a new line of shorts that have the same heavy-duty feeling and loose, comfortable fit I prefer. As it turns out, Youngster from Pokemon Red and Blue wasn’t entirely correct. Shorts CAN BE comfortable and easy to wear. Anyway, it’s Summer as hell right now and I’m not about it even if I do have comfortable clothes and working AC in the office for once [which has broken between writing this post and editing it].

This is going to be a week of tumultuous weather. There have already been several storms and there will be more before the week is out and this unnatural heat spike ends. They are forecasted to happen multiple times a day, each of them with potentially destructive winds, lightning galore, and even some hail. This is a week of furiuos nature raining down on us, the likes of which we have not seen in several years, and it is entirely possible that we will see a repeat of the flooding that occurred seven years ago. Bridges went out. Traintracks were partially washed away. Warehouses flooded. I literally couldn’t get in to work beause of how much standing water there was. And… well, we had snow, it melted, we got plenty of rain, and now we’re going to get absolutely thrashed by even more rain. We’re at a high risk of another set of one hundred years floods in less than a decade because we’re flipflopping between drought and too much rain since the winds and weather conditions that kept the area unpredictable but within a range are no long limited anything. I mean, hell, this is the warmest winter on record with many warmest months on record and while I didn’t predict this week of storms, I’m not exactly surprised.

I just hope I don’t lose power or that my car isn’t too badly damaged by the hail that fell today. It would be just my luck to have the one car that got absolutely wrecked by the storms. I don’t want to spend the little bit of extra cash I’m getting from my taxes getting that old thing fixed up. It’s got quite a few years left in it, yet, and I can’t financially take on new car loans at this moment it time, but I’m not sure how much damage it would take to “total” it. It was a relatively inexpensive car, after all. It wouldn’t take much. Which is why, despite the risk of floods and the increasing cost, I’m keeping my car in my apartment complex’s underground parking garage. If it floods, that’s pretty much it for it. No heartache because what’re you going to do about that? So much worse stuff would have to happen before that, to flood the underground garage, that I could take losing my car in stride. Hail, though? Or dropped tree branches, loose siding, fallen roof tiles, etc? I will always be kicking myself for not moving it sooner or picking a closer spot right next to a tree despite knowing better becaue I was too tired to walk the extra half-block from the next nearest spot. So underground parking it will stay. It is the more likely safe place in this era of climate instability.

It’s a lot right now. All this bad weather on top of everything else. The world coming down around our ears as the people in power (mostly in the US, but elsewhere too) abdicate their responsibilities or abuse their positions for personal gain rather than do anything even remotely useful to the people they supposedly represent or for the world they live on. All that and I can’t even drive back and forth to my exhausting, soul-draining job without needing to plan around torrential downpours, tornado sirens, hail blasts, and enough water that I’m worried about road closures. I just need to get through another couple years with things holding themselves together and then maybe… just maybe, I’ll be able to dig myself out of my student loans enough to live some kind of not-shitty life. That feels like so much to be asking for these days, as the rumbles of thunder in the distance warn me that tonight’s third severe storm approaches and yet I must leave work now so I can go get dinner and maybe have an evening of not chores and labor and effort. Maybe. If I’ve still got power at home, anyway. Last time things were this bad, I drove home to find the power out and had to spend a night sweating on my couch without it. That would really stink.