I spent my most recent Friday (two Fridays ago from when this gets posted) spring-cleaning my apartment. Which feels a little funny to write today, given the blizzard conditions I drove in last night and the multiple inches of slowly-melting slush that still coat the ground today. A lot of which is only just thawing out from last night’s freeze. We’re solidly in April now and still getting wintery weather, despite much of our actual winter being much closer to what I’d expect of spring around this point in the year. It’s not unheard of for us to get a few late snows (as late as May, sometimes) as spring temperatures fluctuate, but we rarely get snow after we’ve had a day that has broke past seventy degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday, two days of rain turned into about thirty-six hours of snow and while it only just barely froze while it was falling yesterday, that little bit of ice and tons of slush turned my evening commute from its comfortable fifteen minutes into an hour-long affair. It was horrendous and coming home to a still-clean apartment was only mildly comforting. After all, I had to turn my heat up again and figure out what I was going to do the next day if the roads proved too treacherous to risk (as it turns out, the roads were fine, but getting to them was nearly impossible because my landlord never plowed my parking lot and being in an underground parking garage means contending with a slippery, uphill drive that proved impossible on mornings like today’s). Which wasn’t a huge issue, but it’s still incredibly off-putting to have spent a solid ten hours with my windows open as I cleaned my apartment more thoroughly than I have since before I moved into it and then, just over three days later, see snow blowing in my still-open bedroom window.

I spent the day cleaning largely for my own benefit. My apartment needed a deep clean, I needed to do something that would turn my brain off for a day, and I needed a way to exert a little control over my life. Also, I was able to bargain that cleaning effort in exchange for taking a four day weekend, which I sorely needed, so I was pretty committed to getting that cleaning done. It was exhausting, of course, as cleaning an entire apartment that deeply over ten hours ought to be, especially given that all of my cleaning implements are made for people who are of an average size or smaller, which is something I am not, and spent all of my time sweeping or mopping floors bent at a forty-five degree angle so I could apply the appropriate pressure. Still, I’m glad I did it, even if the whole “marking the start of spring by starting April with a clean, fresh-smelling apartment” thing fell through on account of the heavy rain over the weekend, the change in forecasted temperatures to hover just above freezing, and then the thirty-six hours of snow I mentioned above. It also didn’t really help my feelings of the seasons being incongruous with the actual passage of time. Or, you know, my climate anxiety.

It also doesn’t help that we’re supposedly in a warm El Niño year, but I think you can paint a much more horrifying picture by looking at how the ocean surface temperatures have given up their steady rise (on average, anyway, since not every year was a record high) and started leaping upward instead. The two are probably linked, but the data we’re seeing is alarming, even if we also know that a change in the fuel that cargo ships used is partly to blame (the old stuff that was recently banned used to be great at creating cloud cover, even if it was also still horrible for the environment in other ways, so this rise isn’t entirely unexpected). I don’t know what this is going to mean beyond the usual “increase in horrible weather events and climate emergencies” stuff, but it’s difficult not to feel like there’s a link between that massive change in a relatively stable, if worrying, system and the sudden and incredibly variable weather I’m seeing in my section of the Midwest. Sure, the Midwest is know for wild changes in weather from one day to the next, but the biggest change is that these changes aren’t as predictable as they once were. Even just a decade ago, in my first year in this city, the forecast was a relatively stable thing when you got down to the three-to-five day period. Now I have to check multiple times a day because my morning forecast can call for a full day of chilly rain and then, by the time I get to work a couple hours later, the forecast is not only calling for snow, but sending out winter weather warnings about how terrible the road conditions will be.

It is difficult to feel like you have any control over your own life when the tools you once used to make sense of and prepare for the world around you are suddenly no longer reliable. All of that without even getting into how the google search result for “weather” used to be a widget that reflected what I’d find when I opened the weather service and how this widget is now significantly different, despite supposedly showing the same location. It’s always off by multiple degrees and often completely incorrect about what the current weather looks like. That particular widget still says that it has been raining non-stop since Sunday. There’s been no mention of any snow despite that fact that when I click the “details” dropdown and it opens the actual application rather than the widget, it actually provides me with the correct weather forecast. At least for the next hour or two, anyway. Even that is wrong more often than its right about anything more than a couple hours away from now and most weather-focused services (accuweather, weatherunderground, etc) aren’t much better. I’m not sure why this widget is becoming so unreliable, but I’m incredibly suspicious that this is some new application of an LLM enshitifying Google’s search results. I’m actually going to need to start looking for something more reliable that doesn’t spam me with adds or tracking junk and I’m genuinely not sure where to even begin to look for that in this day and age. Everything is full of adds, false information delivered under the guise of “AI,” or is just entirely unreliable. It’s so disheartening to know that I can probably do just as good of a job predicting the weather by going outside for a minute or two. Really kind of makes it difficult to feel like there’s any hope of ever feeling in control of my life ever again.